Officials from the government met UK prime minister David Cameron at the weekend ahead of the Group of Eight meeting in Northern Ireland. The issue of tax evasion, and the role of IFCs, has been widely commented upon ahead of the meeting.

The Cayman Islands, along with jurisdictions such as the British Virgin Islands, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, have for long insisted that they are becoming more transparent as jurisdictions and in fact, in some ways superior to “onshore” locations.

“We warmly welcome our meeting with the Prime Minister today to discuss tax, trade and transparency, where we had a very constructive exchange of views on the practical steps needed to tackle the global problem of tax evasion,” the Ministry for Financial Services, at the Cayman Islands Government, said in a statement.

The jurisdiction said it agreed three steps:

- To play an active part in the new pilot initiative of multilateral automatic tax information exchange launched by the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain;

- To publish national action plans on beneficial ownership; and

- To commit to joining the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance on Tax Matters.

The issue of disclosing beneficial owners of structures such as offshore trusts is difficult. At a recent conference in London hosted by Jersey Finance, the promotional agency for Jersey’s financial sector, speakers argued that disclosure of such ownership could compromise legitimate client confidentiality and put some wealthy individuals and their families at risk.

The Cayman Islands government statement struck a positive tone in how it intended to promote co-operations with other jurisdictions.

“As part of our continuing commitment to tackling tax evasion and fraud, we have also undertaken to publish action plans, at the same time as those G8 countries publishing plans in Lough Erne, setting out the concrete steps, where needed, to fully implement the Financial Action Task Force standards to further increase transparency on beneficial ownership information and to ensure that this information is freely available to law enforcement and tax authorities,” the statement said.