Four Caribbean 'tax havens' added to offshore database

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has released information from four secrecy jurisdictions’ corporate registries that were included in the Paradise Papers investigation.

Barbados, the Bahamas, Aruba and Nevis have now been added to 51 other jurisdictions searchable on the the Offshore Leaks database.

In total more than 160,000 entities and close to the same number of shareholders and directors of those companies were added to the Offshore Leaks database, which already includes data from the Offshore Leaks, Panama Papers and Bahamas Leaks projects as well as the portion of the Paradise Papers data connected to the offshore law firm Appleby.

With this release, the Offshore Leaks database now has information on more than 680,000 entities like companies, foundations and trusts.

These four jurisdictions were previously highlighted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as being “uncooperative tax havens.”

However, the OECD removed them from the list after they committed to implementing the OECD’s standards of transparency and exchange of information.

Despite that, Barbados was included on the European Union’s recent blacklist of tax havens while Aruba was part of the “grey list” that agreed to amend or abolish its “harmful tax regime” by 2018.

EU member states did not include Bahamas or the federation of St Kitts and Nevis, noting when the list was released that they “were severely struck by devastating storms in September 2017, causing casualties and major damage to key infrastructure.”

Each of these jurisdictions, except Nevis, has an online registry with limited information available via a company name search. However, none allow searches by officer names, which is critical to finding information about directors and beneficial owners of those entities.

Often it is these searches that allow ICIJ, and its media partners, to report on stories such as those in the Paradise Papers.

The Barbados registry is available online but offers only restricted information and doesn’t guarantee its accuracy.

“The database is updated only periodically by a private contractor and accordingly, search results will not give a real-time reflection of all the entries,” its website notes.

“In these circumstances, the office does not and cannot guarantee the accuracy or integrity of any of the search results which are obtained from this site.”

An example of the information displayed on the Barbados’ online corporate registry.

The more than 40,000 Barbados entities added to the Offshore Leaks database can be searched by company names and are connected to more than 120,000 officers. Many of these listed officers may be nominee directors.

For example, Trevor A Carmichael – a top lawyer on the island and often a nominee director – is is connected in the data to more than more than 1,000 companies.

In tax havens, nominee directors are third parties registered as an administrator of a company instead of its real beneficial owner or manager, who remain anonymous.

The availability of information about owners and directors in the Paradise Papers data was key to discovering that the president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, was a director of two Barbados companies linked to an education finance company, one of which was called Global Tuition & Education Insurance Corp. As a response, Santos published his 2015 and 2016 income statements the following day.