Canada competing with the Cayman Islands

BALTIMORE, USA: Hot Air Network, June 30, 2009 – Bermuda and the Cayman Islands may have some competition for Barack Obama’s vitriol over tax havens if Canada keeps on its low-business-tax course. The Harper government in Ottawa has quietly dropped its corporate tax rate and has pressed the provinces to do the same in order to get to a low combined tax rate for businesses. American companies pressed by the threat of the Obama administration to tax overseas profits have begun to notice.


Cayman accounts used to conceal income from IRS

WASHINGTON, USA: Sys-Con Media, June 30, 2009 – Roderick Prescott, a resident of Orem, Utah, pleaded guilty today to tax evasion, the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced. Prescott admitted to evading at least $550,000 in personal income taxes for 1998 and 1999.

According to the government’s trial brief, Fountainhead Global Trust (FGT), a purported offshore investment that promised returns as high as 50 percent per year, was a Ponzi scheme which collected approximately $20 million in investors’ funds from 1995 through 1999. FGT transferred some of the money to an offshore account in the Cayman Islands at the Bank of Bermuda.

According to the government’s trial brief, Prescott and Fritts used an array of purported trusts and related bank accounts, including numerous offshore bank accounts at the Bank of Bermuda in the Cayman Islands, to conceal their income from the IRS. Prescott and Fritts also used false or fictitious taxpayer identification numbers and offshore credit cards in fake names issued to them by the Bank of Bermuda in the Cayman Islands.


Lobbyists go to dinner in the Cayman Islands

WASHINGTON, USA: Blog of Legal Times, June 30, 2009 – Quinn Gillespie lobbyists Jack Quinn and Manuel Ortiz will update their client, the Cayman Islands Financial Services Association, on their Capitol Hill efforts - over dinner in the Caymans.

The firm confirms that Quinn and Ortiz will speak at a dinner sponsored by the association on July 7. The subject is strategies to combat the islands’ reputation as a haven for American tax evaders, something the association and Quinn Gillespie dispute.

“We’re going to be reporting to a group in the Cayman Islands on our ongoing efforts to get the truth out,” Quinn said, in a statement relayed through a spokesperson. The Cayman Islands, he says, are “a vital element of the global financial marketplace, not a place to practice tax evasion.”