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By Chas Sillimon, taxonomy correspondent
Tax havens are hatching extravagant and increasingly desperate strategems to counter the threat to their existence posed by President Obama's plan to outlaw US businesses from using offshore tax havens. The new President has vowed to "detect and pursue" tax evaders and close tax loopholes that have allowed many U.S. companies to relocate themselves to islands such as Bermuda and the Caymans.
"We're sweating bullets over here, I don't mind saying," said J Dexter Craven, business development director at the Cayman Islands Tax Efficiency Task Force. "We've had a team working on what to do about this since Obama brought it up out on the campaign trail. We'd kept our fingers crossed he was going to forget about it when he got elected into the Oval Office. But dang it, if the darned guy didn't live up to his word. I tell you, it's a dark day when politicians start keeping their campaign promises."
Now sun-kissed offshore centres are borrowing a leaf out of James Bond novels in a bid to escape punitive tax penalties that would threaten their financial existence. The Cayman government has approved a plan for the three islands to be towed nearly 500 miles to a new resting place off the coast of Florida.
"The plan is we're going to pretend we're one of the Florida Keys," said Craven. "We have the island's inhabitants on an intensive acclimatisation course and we've hired a Hollywood screenwriter to develop a backstory for us.
"If anyone asks we're Key Cargo. If they say they've never heard or seen us before, we'll tell them that until recently we were a top-secret installation used exclusively by the National Security Agency that's only recently been declassified. If anyone gets really nosey we'll cite national security and threaten to kill them."
Bermuda is understood to be in the final stages of agreeing an intricate strategy that would see it picked up and flown across to mainland United States and then dropped into Delaware Bay near Cape Henlopen. It would masquerade as a new theme park attraction, Captive World, in which it carries on its business while pretending to offer visitors "an authentic taste" of what life was like on a tax haven.
"It will be very authentic," chuckled one senior Bermuda government minister, still evidently tickled pink at the cleverness of the island's masterplan to outwit the tax inspectors of the world's superpower.
"We have heard whispers of far-fetched plans to evade the President's new tax plans," said Ebeneezer S. Crooge III, of the Internal Revenue Service. "We have asked the U.S. Coastguard to double their offshore patrols in the days following the Capitol Hill debate on this legislation. We have asked them to be especially vigilant for suspicious movements of large land masses and the suspicious disappearance of islands from their radar screens."
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