Cost of French expert was money well spent says PM

Prime Minister Mia Mottley has hit back at opposition criticism over her administration’s hiring of a French tax expert, defending his work so far, while disputing that he was being paid $2 million annually.

During his reply to the Budget, Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne made the accusation, suggesting also that the government was choosing high-priced foreign personnel over local expertise. However, Mottley on Wednesday night slammed the accusation as innuendo.

In fact, the prime minister said the Frenchman, a former head of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) tax division and who was instrumental in helping the island improve its network of double taxation and investment treaties, improve corporate tax collection, assisted the island in its efforts to be removed from various grey and black lists.

While stressing that the tax expert was not being paid $2 million, she did not specify his compensation package.

“Last night you heard that this government was paying someone a million US dollars for the year, as if we were doing something nefarious, ‘thiefing’ and dishonest. To begin with the numbers were wrong and I’m not going to quibble on that,” Mottley told the Lower House of Parliament.

She added further: “We are in danger if we did not remove ourselves from the grey list and the black list, of having companies leave this country because those companies, insurance companies and others for example working in Europe would not be able to do business here anymore if Barbados continued on this list. We took a decision early on to be able to move away from that kind of lurching . . . with respect to our activities in Europe.”

Mottley explained that government hired the tax expert in 2023 following the decision of several industrialised nations to introduce a global minimum tax which had implications for Barbados. She said the Frenchman and his team assisted government in corporate tax reform and worked with the International Business division and was now “repositioning us with our insurance and our funds to make sure that we remain competitive”.

According to the prime minister: “We asked him to work with corporate taxation, which meant working with the Barbados Revenue Authority. The notion of persons working with us goes back to the days of the 1980s when a gentleman called Mr Bruce Zagaris worked with us from government on both sides of the aisle and Mr Geoffrey Bell who worked with the Central Bank of Barbados and was responsible for all of our engagements in the markets.”

Insisting that her administration had nothing to hide, Mottley contended that the only reason the opposition leader was in a position to bring the information to Parliament was due to its availability on government’s Bonfire Platform.

“I am making it absolutely clear that what we do and with whom we contract is completely and openly available to the entire public,” she argued.

Furthermore, she said the decision of her administration to employ the French professional enabled government to end a more costly contract for services in Brussels.

“The same gentleman now works with the ambassador at Brussels in the European Union. . . . He’s working with Invest Barbados, he’s working with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he’s working with the Ministry of International Business which is now the Ministry of Commerce, and he is also working with the Barbados Defence Force seeking to find financing at concessional rates for the renewal of its Coast Guard fleet,” she disclosed.  (IMC1)