If you will permit me an immodesty, it was more than a decade ago, that at financial centers around the world and with laborsome petition here at home, I warned over and again about the "capitulation mentality". That is to say, I warned over and again that whilst we must always be wise and canny enough to see and accept that we are a small nation, it was - at the same time - important never, under any circumstances, to leave any impression that we were to be harassed, hustled or harangued into accepting another country's financial rules. My reason was, and reasonings were, simple: We are a sovereign nation. And sovereignty is not something you wait and wish others to respect. It is what you must project and demand.
I warned, in addition, at a lecture at Jesus College, Cambridge (at which the justices of The Bahamas Supreme Court were in attendance), saying the following: "International financial centers must not misunderstand this blacklisting initiative by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It is not new. This has nothing to do with financial services. What we are witnessing is the first stages of the economic philosophy of the future. In this new game, large nations, which have been responsible for every global crisis will use every means to pressure smaller nations into bogus initiatives masquerading as 'international standards'. The danger for Caribbean financial services jurisdictions is that we have been in this business, without the slightest understanding of our role in the global financial system. When taken together with our tendency to value and validate foreign initiatives over our own interests, we are likely to capitulate quickly under the notion that capitulation will be taken as compliance. However, it is a tragedy to capitulate under the hope of being compliant, when the objective of those imposing initiatives upon you are intent upon your annihilation".
There is an additional foundational point: The OECD, Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) initiatives on "cross border" financial services regulations are utterly unconstitutional. Our government ministers who find themselves as members of these organizations and their subordinate agencies are in breach of our constitution. Our agencies that pass information on account holders with no legitimate probable cause effect a breach of the constitutional rights of those account holders. Let us say, that the "regulations", change in our laws, unconstitutionalities were done in the short term because we had to act to save our financial services sector. The article in Tuesday's Guardian, titled "Bahamas falls in financial center ranking", lays waste to that strategy, such as it is. The Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), which is put out by the Z/Yen Group stated: "Offshore centers continue to struggle with reputation and regulation".
But how could this be, when for 14 years, the nations the Z/Yen group places at the top of its rankings, which are mostly members of the G-20, have imposed regulation upon initiative and constraint upon constraint - even by means of threat - on small financial centers? And after all these impositions, how could it be that our financial centers continue to fall these rankings, when in the last 14 years, we have pretzelized ourselves by twisting capitulations to every initiative imposed upon us, whilst in that same period those nations whom Y/Yen rank at the top nearly destroyed the global financial system twice though outrageous criminal activity? How can New York rank so high when it was the source of outright larceny and conscious habitual theft, aided by their very agencies that define us as corrupt? How is London ranked so high when, to this day, no one has gone to jail over the LIBOR scandal in which millions of people worldwide were snookered into paying bogus interest rates and suffered loss?
I shall tell you: The Z/Yen Group in their rankings right in the midst of the global financial crisis stated that the "risk to the global financial system was offshore financial centers", this in the teeth of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland and others. This is rather like saying that the threat to your home is the water twirling at the bottom of your sink, when a category five hurricane is twirling outside. The problem is, as I said, we are not financial centers. We are jurisdictions that offer some financial services, and we came into existence by accident and never advanced beyond that. And so, regrettably, as I advised so long ago, drunk on our own Kool-Aid, we continue to fall in these rankings, because they were not designed for us. It was designed in the interests of larger nations using their position and power to redefine us to the world, even as we break our necks to conform to their unconstitutional demands. However, had we, as I also advised, formed amongst ourselves, an international financial centers organization, registered as an international body with the United Nations, we would have had by now a true rankings system, in which at least our own reasons and reasonings would have projected and demanded a resonance in the world.

Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian