Top 10 Tax Headlines from Offshore The Cayman Islands seems to be riding through its own version of the ‘perfect storm’. It has faced the challenges of the OECD and successfully made it to the White List as a transparent jurisdiction, in signing over 12 tax treaties with other jurisdictions. The Gibraltar tax year runs from the 1st July to 30th June and on 25 June the Chief Minister Peter Caruana delivered his budget speech to reflect on the performance of the Gibraltar economy and set out the Government’s budget proposals for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2010. In 2007, as a result of HMRC receiving information from five major UK banks with offshore subsidiaries, HMRC offered an Offshore Disclosure Facility (“ODF”) which was designed to allow those people holding offshore accounts to declare those accounts and put their tax affairs in order. At the conclusion of a very busy period of negotiations with a large number of jurisdictions, Gibraltar’s government yesterday signed a further three Tax Information Exchange Agreements (‘TIEA’) with the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Finland. In a welcome move which the Irish Government had flagged in the budget, Ireland’s latest Finance Bill introduces a scheme of capital allowances (tax depreciation) on capital expenditure incurred by companies on acquiring certain specified intangible assets. There has been a great deal of attention focused on the CaymanIslands these past few months, more so than usual. Much of thedebate as to what to do about the so called "taxhavens" has ranged from the White House, the G8, the G20to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development("OECD"). Manx tax legislation does not specifically refer to Trusts and instead taxes according to a mixture of both residence and source basing factors in each case. Persoal Taxation - Income Tax Rates The offshore funds rules were originally enacted at a time, as now, when there was a substantial difference between the rates of income tax and capital gains tax, to prevent investors in offshore vehicles from converting income accumulated within the offshore vehicle into capital on the disposal of that interest. After the introduction of the 1992 International Trusts Law, Cyprus can compare favourably with most tax locations worldwide, particularly in view of the competitive tax incentives for trust formation in Cyprus which render the trust a very attractive tax vehicle for non-residents in Cyprus. | 
