‘It’s all very well talking about going for growth,’ said one senior member of the island’s financial services industry as they left St James a couple of weeks ago, having learned about the ambitious finance sector growth strategy they, their firm and their rivals were now being asked to pursue.
‘But you can’t do that very well when you’ve got the prospect of territorial tax hanging over you and threatening to effectively close us down.’
It’s talk like that which has finally encouraged Policy & Resources Committee to see sense and consign territorial tax to the dustbin of failed options it has interrogated in a hunt for ‘anything but GST’ over the past year.
Seems territorial tax is not, as Deputy Mark Helyar said this week, a ‘unicorn solution’ to our revenue problems.
Not that territorial tax is intrinsically evil. It works well in several places. But it fails Guernsey now on two, arguably three, levels. It doesn’t make the island the money we might have hoped. Potentially it might even cost us money, and anecdotal evidence from those in the know seems to back that up.
But even worse, it creates uncertainty – that doom-laden word for financial services.
Having fought so hard to avoid being grey- or black-listed by the international regulators through Moneyval, why would we want to do it to ourselves?
