To The Editor
“The Anguillian”
Anguilla
Don Mitchell’s Article: “Anguilla’s Autonomy In Question”
Many of us would agree with much of Don’s article which appeared in your publication of 8 March 2024. But not all of it.
Don spends the first 3 paragraphs discussing whether something he read is AI-generated and concludes saying “I admit I could be mistaken in my conclusions”. Does it matter if the topic was AI-generated? Sure, we have to be wary about deepfakes and AI-generated misinformation in a year when over a thousand million people go to the polls. But, if the offending piece was written by AI and nobody was aware of it till Don reacted to it, Don gave it a prominence that it hadn’t expected.
Don then talks about the financial services industry, claiming that there were “several hundred other paper banks and tens of thousands of shell companies, some of which seemed to serve no purpose other than the commission of fraud of one kind of another”. Well, “some” might have been, just as “some” similar entities currently operate in the UK, USA and the majority of countries around the world. But how many of these thousands of companies are “some”? “Some” is often defined as “an unspecified amount or number”. But readers could be led to believe that in Don’s context it refers to a large number. And “some” could have been incorporated by Don’s own firm.
We then read that, “By 1984, offshore banking in Anguilla was dead”. Not to people who were around at the time. Different, yes. But “dead”? The paragraph continues “Rodney Gallagher was sent in to shut down the offshore banks”. Well, if the industry was dead, what was there to shut down? Don adds that “Gallagher was an MI5 operative provided with cover as a chartered accountant by Coopers & Lybrand’s branch in Barbados”.
Many in the financial services industry (and some are still around) had no great affection for Mr. Gallagher (which might speak well of his effectiveness and the consequences he caused). Furthermore, MI5 operates within the UK to protect its national security (whereas the Special Intelligence Service, popularly referred to as MI6, is the foreign intelligence service of the UK). Moreover, it is generally understood that the only member of the staff of MI5 whose identity is made public is the Director General (currently Ken McCallum); the identity of everyone else is kept secret for operational reasons. So, it appears that the “chartered accountant as a cover for being a MI5 operative” is iffy – the only way that Don could know that Rodney Gallagher was an MI5 operative would be by a process of deduction (which is not stated) or if Gallagher or someone who Don knows was talking vaingloriously, and Don accepted it without question – because real MI5 operatives don’t admit to being such: if someone tells you they work for MI5, you can assume they don’t; if someone doesn’t tell you they work for MI5, maybe they do and maybe they don’t. On the balance of probabilities, Gallagher wasn’t an MI5 operative.
Although the FSC was formed in 2004, its first director, John Lawrence, was in Anguilla before then; Mr. Lawrence set up the FSC – the FSC was not created before he joined it. Before the FSC there was the Financial Services Department headed by, among others, Mr. Lawrence and Alex Richardson – among his claims to fame was composing the Anguilla National Song.
Don then goes on to state, quite boldly “Since at least 2017 the EU has included Anguilla on its blacklist of tax havens”. The first thing to note is that the phrase “tax haven” is rarely used by serious journalists or commentators these days. Seriously, ask yourself, “what is a tax haven”? If country A charges a tax at 50% and country B charges that tax at 30%, does that make country B a tax haven? Is Florida a tax haven because it does not charge income tax? If so, most countries in the world are tax havens. Secondly, Anguilla was added to the list in October 2022 and it should be noted that the team headed by the Government of Anguilla and the FSC are working assiduously to get Anguilla removed from that blacklist.
Two paragraphs later, Don accurately states that “within the past 12 months [Government of Anguilla] revenue began to grow exponentially from a combination of unpopular new taxes and the sale of international services”. I think that by this he means “GST and revenue from the .ai domain name”. We all communicate differently, but I wish that he had spent less time writing about whether something he had read was AI generated or not, and more on the impact of GST and the .ai domain name. We read reports of these revenue measures but with rare exceptions, there seems to be little in the way of information that can’t be described as “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. So, we have to go hunting ourselves.
Much of what Don says may be put into context by an authoritative, external source, which puts into perspective taxes and other revenues going to Anguilla’s Government as a percent of GDP. Even if there are biases in the figures, they are likely to be fairly constant across this list. If we accept that premise, Anguilla ranks as the 7th highest in the world (and this was as of 2017, so it could well be another 20% to 40% higher today – we could be at the top of that list): https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/taxes-and-other-revenues/country-comparison Even by this list (which was pre-GST etc.), Anguilla’s percentage of government income (tax mainly) as a percentage of what the economy produces, was far higher than anywhere in the Caribbean region (excepting – then, but maybe not now – Cuba), the UK, USA, Canada, China, and even renowned socially egalitarian countries such as Sweden and Norway. Governments that raise revenue from one source (e.g. “.ai domain name”) often reduce it from another (e.g. GST) and maintain the same level of service.
THAT, dear reader, is where the real story is.
Yours faithfully,
J.B.
