PM say Barbados and other small states left out of talks on global tax regime

Ongoing attempts to implement a global minimum corporate tax regime has raised the ire of Prime Minister Mia Mottley who slammed her international counterparts for excluding the world’s most vulnerable states in its deliberations.

Earlier this month, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) proposed new rules requiring companies to be taxed at a rate of at least 15 per cent, which is projected to raise more than $150 billion in global tax revenues annually.

The initiative could, however, spell trouble for Barbados-based international businesses that currently benefit from the attractiveness of this country’s low corporate taxes that amount to 5.5 per cent at most.

During her lengthy address at the naming ceremony for the University of the West Indies (UWI) Cave Hill’s CARICOM Research Building, Mottley called for regional togetherness on an issue which small states cannot confront individually.

“We know that a world that is rooted in fairness and transparency ought never to exclude the perspective or comments of those that are most vulnerable among its global community, particularly when it is simply to ask for clarification and to ask for the framework and the timeframe within which matters that can affect as much as 13 per cent of our revenue will have to be crafted,” the Prime Minister contended.

“We accept that the world will go where it wants to go, but we also accept that the world cannot so disrupt the organization and functioning of nation states without so much as a conversation and without so much as the provision of details, that to do so would be horrific and destabilizing, as we fight other major existential crises such as climate and such as the pandemic against the background of vaccine inequity.”

Mottley added that countries’ freedom to determine their own tax policy is a fundamental part of sovereignty as she announced her intention to participate on Friday in discussions on the critical area.

“And this is so fundamentally different from the Government structures that hold our societies together, that we have to ask for a moment to pause and to have serious discussions on these matters, because these countries that have participated in the international financial arena were encouraged to do so by the very same countries that now want to shut it down,” she lamented.

“If you do not know your history, you cannot get through this moment in the 21st century, for in so many ways it reflects the mood, the attitude, the battles of a century ago in different formats’ but it is the same characters, the same motivations, the same unconscious bias and the same battles just being thrown at us in a different way, and if we don’t stay together as a people or as a region, then that which successfully allowed us to be the subject of exploitation will happen again,” Prime Minister Mottley warned.

The initial decision to adjust the tax policy was raised among members of the elite G7 forum and technical details on its implementation are to be agreed upon by October so that the new rules can be implemented by 2023.
(KS)