The Hidden History of the Bahamas, the World’s Top Offshore Cryptocurrency Tax Haven

On Jan. 3, as Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not responsible in New York on expenses stemming from the collapse of one of many world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, the FTX debacle turned, as soon as once more, a U.S. story. The Bahamian backdrop to the final days of FTX has light into the background. However the torrid affair between what was as soon as touted as the vanguard of economic know-how, or fintech, and the Bahamas—a nation of 400,000 folks, unfold over some 700 islands, 50 miles or so offshore of Florida—is just not merely incidental. It highlights the best way by which the broader Caribbean area has repeatedly functioned as a Frankenstein laboratory of worldwide capitalism.

The Caribbean was the primary area of the world to really feel the complete power of Western conquest and planation slavery. Within the seventeenth and 18th centuries, the Bahamas was a legendary base for piracy and smuggling. The twentieth century introduced the rise of American energy and the struggles of the Chilly Struggle. Repeatedly, the delicate island chains have been wracked by hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes, all of which convey devastation but additionally immediate the churn of property and new waves of funding.

Yearly, the spectacular great thing about the Caribbean attracts thousands and thousands of vacationers looking for sea and solar. Casinos and resorts jostle with the remnants of plantations, dilapidated factories, and freeports. Mega-yachts, quick boats, cruise ships, tramp steamers, vacationer flights, and personal planes allow folks, cash, and items to flow into.

It’s a area of maximum inequalities each between and inside nations. The Bahamas, with a GDP per capita of round $30,000, is likely one of the highest-income international locations within the area, that includes pockets of maximum affluence like that loved by the FTX crew on the Albany resort on the island of New Windfall. On the similar time, the minimal wage in Nassau, at $250 per week, is that of a lower-middle-income nation. That, nonetheless, is sufficient to entice tens of hundreds of migrants from Haiti, who eke out an existence in shanty slums huddled round each Bahamian settlement and city.

If you’re searching for an escape from authorities regulation, even in an age of digital surveillance, the secluded cays and personal airstrips of the islands supply ample alternatives for privateness. Within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, drug cash from the Colombian cartels flooded the whole area. However the actually huge cash, trillions of {dollars} all instructed, is drawn to locations such because the Bahamas, not by anarchy however by a extremely manicured, and strenuously maintained, monetary seclusion. It’s an financial mannequin precariously balanced between profound poverty and excessive wealth, in a area that was as soon as a battlefield of geopolitical pressure and now faces the historic problem of local weather change.

Tax havens and offshore monetary facilities are a response to the fiscal and regulatory calls for of the twentieth century. The primary such venues emerged in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein and throughout the British Empire in the course of the interwar interval, when the rich first had must shelter their cash from the heavy taxes imposed by newly democratized states shouldering the monetary calls for of whole battle. The primary wealth administration workplaces opened in Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, within the Nineteen Thirties. They acquired an extra enhance within the Fifties, when the trade and capital controls of the Bretton Woods system triggered the seek for simpler methods to maneuver {dollars} round. Beneath the benign neglect of the Financial institution of England, so-called eurodollars had been borrowed and lent forwards and backwards throughout the offshore world, past the attain of U.S. Treasury laws.

To flow into and transfer freely, capital should be legally coded—that’s, it should acquire recognition below a authorized system. English frequent legislation is likely one of the principal codes worldwide with which to flexibly administer contracts and property rights. It’s not accidentally that so most of the key tax havens, whether or not or not it’s within the Channel Islands, the Caribbean, or within the Indian Ocean, lie inside what had been previously outposts of the British Empire.

However legislation alone doesn’t an offshore monetary heart make. Take Jamaica, as an illustration: English-speaking and ruled by frequent legislation however nobody’s thought of an offshore monetary haven. The query is just not solely which authorized code you employ however what makes use of that code is perhaps put to. How doubtless is it for use for the needs of taxation, regulation, and even expropriation? The query is especially urgent in a postcolonial state the place the vast majority of the inhabitants is just not solely disenfranchised and propertyless however the descendants of slaves. Following Fidel Castro’s takeover of Cuba in 1959, it appeared fairly potential that the Caribbean would possibly turn into very harmful for personal property. After Jamaica gained independence in 1962, its politics had been far too bare-knuckle for the nation to be enticing to worldwide capital.

Throughout the area, the mixture of nationalism, Black radicalism, and socialism created a flamable combination. And the specter of revolution provoked aggressive intervention. This hit the previous Spanish Empire in 1965, with the U.S. intervention within the Dominican Republic. However British possessions weren’t exempt both. In 1983, the fratricidal Marxist regime in Grenada, the place a British-appointed governor-general nonetheless held courtroom, was overthrown by a navy intervention led by the US and backed by Barbados, Jamaica, and Dominica—all three of them former British territories. Socialism was quashed, English frequent legislation prevailed, however huge cash didn’t just like the drama.

One technique to keep away from the perils of freedom was merely to stay below British authority, and that was doubly enticing for white minorities that may see their energy and privilege threatened by majority rule. British abroad territories have parliamentary assemblies and heads of presidency, however a governor serves because the native consultant of British monarchical authority and workout routines a examine on international affairs and something that is perhaps of worldwide financial curiosity. The British Virgin Islands and Bermuda each remained as British abroad territories and have constructed thriving offshore monetary facilities that now rank as a few of the most egregious bolt-holes for world capital. However probably the most telling instance is the Cayman Islands, which till Jamaican independence was ruled from Kingston and after 1962 opted to stay as a crown colony after which as an abroad territory with its personal structure. The Caymans has since turn into the worldwide hub for the registration of hedge funds. International cash has a revealed desire, in brief, not merely for England’s authorized code however for the consolation of attenuated imperial energy.

Towards this backdrop, the Bahamas is the really distinctive case of a postcolonial Black-majority state that can also be a world-class monetary heart. (Among the many main tax havens worldwide, the one comparable case is Mauritius within the Indian Ocean. It has a majority Indian inhabitants, gained independence in 1968, and ranks only some locations beneath the Bahamas within the Tax Justice Community’s Corporate Tax Haven Index.) The Bahamas has a profitable mixture of steady politics and excessive earnings. Certainly, it has the very best earnings of any Black-majority impartial state on this planet. Of the bigger states in Caribbean, it’s the just one to have managed, since independence, to go and not using a bailout program from the Worldwide Financial Fund (IMF).

You would possibly, due to this fact, be tempted to think about a self-sustaining virtuous circle, by which offshore monetary companies generate affluence, which underpins democratic stability. However that may be to magnify the importance of economic companies as a driver of financial progress. Within the Bahamas, the monetary companies sector contributes 10-15 percent of GDP and a pair of p.c of employment. This small footprint is just not a bug however a characteristic of offshore finance. In any case, the entire level of offshore, what makes it preferable to onshore, is that you don’t pay taxes and have minimal native commitments. Even within the Cayman Islands, with a inhabitants of lower than 80,000 and a very outsized monetary footprint, monetary companies account for about 30 percent of GDP.

In all of those instances, except for having inherited frequent legislation from the English and averted the escalatory dynamic of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics, what has given the offshore monetary system the cocoon of native political stability is prosperity generated by a second offshore financial system—tourism and international property growth. The important thing to success on this regard is proximity to the US. Bimini, the westernmost island chain within the Bahamas, is simply 50 miles from Miami. On a peaceful day, you possibly can cross over in a few hours on a ferry or personal boat. The flight from Miami to Nassau takes barely an hour. Of the thousands and thousands of people that go to the Bahamas yearly, 80 p.c are American. The native forex, the Bahamian greenback, is pegged 1 to 1 to its U.S. equal. Bahamian provide chains, meals and groceries, and the Bahamian faculty system are all Americanized. The colonial historical past could also be British, however since 1945, the predominant affect has been American.

Tourism and property growth are chargeable for greater than 60 p.c of Bahamian GDP. Not like offshore finance, whose footprint stays restricted, mass tourism and property growth have a transformative impression on the host state. Tourism is capital-intensive, requiring billions of {dollars} in international direct funding after which the mobilization of a big labor power. It’s the success of tourism and property growth that makes the Bahamas—regardless of its independence, its democracy, and its excessive inequality—sufficiently steady to even be enticing as a middle of offshore finance. The penthouse rental by which FTX was holed up is not only a backdrop. It’s a vital a part of the story.

It additionally units up a fragile stability. Not solely is the vacationer financial system, just like the monetary financial system, topic to sudden and dramatic shocks. However exactly as a result of it entails large-scale native employment, bodily infrastructure, and the shopping for and promoting of land—as a result of it, due to this fact, entails the transformation of the native setting—it stimulates battle of a form not engendered by offshore banking. It engages the supercharged racial politics of the postcolonial aftermath, and it does so with specific power within the case of the Bahamas due to its proximity not simply to the US however to the American South, the place struggles over segregation and civil rights coincided with the turmoil of the Caribbean independence actions.

Between the Nineteen Thirties and the Nineteen Sixties, earlier than Bahamian independence, native elites and their international backers conceived of an offshore vacationer and monetary financial system within the type of a racially segregated enclave. In Nassau, a outstanding member of the white enterprise clique often known as the Bay Road Boys used the income from Prohibition-era rum-running to construct a 10-foot-high wall dividing the white from the Black a part of city. The founding constitution of the 50,000-acre Freeport growth on the island of Grand Bahama offered for the house owners to function their very own immigration coverage. The tourism-industrial complicated was rigidly segregated. The mob pursuits that hot-tailed from Cuba to the Bahamas in 1959 noticed to it that the gaming tables had been staffed by their cronies from Vegas and Miami.

By the late Nineteen Eighties, U.S. efforts had largely succeeded in ending the drug stream. The top of the Chilly Struggle modified the complexion of geopolitics within the area. And in 1992, Pindling and the PLP had been lastly voted out. However even earlier than the altering of the guard in Nassau, the Bahamas elite had set about cleansing up the islands’ fame. Beneath large stress from the US, the Group for Financial Cooperation and Growth (OECD), and different worldwide businesses, Bahamian banks started not less than superficially to extend their transparency and crack down on cash laundering.

After all, there was nonetheless cash to be made in offering offshore companies. And the aim of these preparations is avoidance, so scandals are a recurring characteristic of the enterprise. Between 1994 and 2002, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet laundered practically $12 million by means of two offshore shell firms within the Bahamas. In 2006, U.S. authorities indicted the president of a Bahamas-based offshore funding agency for laundering greater than $1 billion in funds derived from tax evasion, drug trafficking, securities fraud, and financial institution fraud. As just lately as 2017, the leak of the so-called Paradise Papers uncovered the possession of hundreds of offshore autos created by the legislation agency Appleby on behalf of shoppers together with European blue bloods, Chinese language princelings, Russian oligarchs, and African potentates, in addition to hundreds of a lot smaller fry.

The stance of the Bahamian authorities is to not be rogue however to be not less than superficially compliant, reacting to international criticism by taking measures towards a number of the apparent suspects and cleansing up no matter a part of the Augean steady is presently within the headlines. The extradition treaty below which Bankman-Fried was arrested and handed over to the U.S. authorities was signed in 1990 and marks the event of this turning over of a brand new leaf. After being criticized by the OECD in 2000, Nassau rushed by means of a rack of banking laws. Grey-listed by the U.S. Monetary Motion Process Pressure in 2018, the Bahamas intensified its prosecution of cash laundering instances. In 2022, even because it sifted by means of the wreckage of FTX, the Bahamas proudly boasted of getting been faraway from the European Union’s checklist of cash laundering jurisdictions and attaining an ideal rating within the rankings for the struggle towards financial crime.

However offshore finance was all the time the icing on the cake. The mainstays of the Bahamian financial system are tourism and property growth, and it was their revival that was essential to the stabilization of the Nineteen Nineties. The brand new authorities of Hubert Ingraham and the Free Nationwide Motion occasion that was elected in 1992 lifted the ban on international purchases of land as much as 5 hectares. As well as, the Bahamian authorities started the follow of constructing gigantic concessions of public land to encourage the launching of so-called anchor tasks throughout the island chain. The mannequin was Lyford Cay, the primary unique gated neighborhood close to Nassau, which was now replicated throughout the islands in areas equivalent to Baker’s Bay on Nice Guana Cay, the place Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, and different A-listers take pleasure in beachfront houses.

In the meantime, on New Windfall, the lodge and on line casino resort mannequin underwent a startling rejuvenation. Within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, the driving power of Bahamian resort growth had been Vegas and Miami connections. Within the Nineteen Nineties, each the cash and the inspiration got here from what was, at first look, a extra unlikely supply: South Africa.

Within the Nineteen Eighties, in Bophuthatswana, a Bantustan that South Africa’s apartheid regime had declared a satellite tv for pc state, the lodge magnate Sol Kerzner had constructed the Solar Metropolis resort right into a model that was synonymous with high-rolling glamor and anti-apartheid boycott-breaking. Within the Nineteen Nineties, as apartheid ended and sanctions had been lifted, he hoped to department out and prolong his enclave resort mannequin into North America. Finally, he would construct a serious on line casino in Connecticut inside simple attain of the New York and Boston markets on the tribal lands ceded to the Mohegan in 1994. On the similar time, within the early Nineteen Nineties, he acquired an curiosity within the run-down Bahamian resort of Paradise Island. With over a billion {dollars} in funding, the renamed Atlantis resort would turn into a showcase for a brand new sort of stage-managed postmodern vacationer expertise. Within the mode of Walt Disney Imagineering, Paradise Island, which as soon as bore the title of Donald Trump, was refashioned as an invented archaeological web site that uncovered the origin fantasy of the misplaced metropolis of Atlantis. The resort took liberties with the Atlantan legend that originated with Plato, an thought inspired by the invention off the seashores of Bimini, the place King had written his Nobel Peace Prize speech, of what fans took to be a sunken stone roadway. To the enjoyable and thrills of a on line casino resort, Kerzner added an organizing theme. It supplied, for roulette tables and waterslides, the identical sort of narrative extra that crypto would convey to banking and funds. These weren’t simply examples of economic engineering or tourism infrastructure. These had been finance and recreation reimagined.

It was this deadlock that first impelled Bahamian promoters to show to crypto. Was fintech the magic that the Bahamas wanted to revive its flagging monetary companies sector and steal a march on the Caymans? Each of the Bahamas’s contending political events rallied to the promise of a brand new period. Nicely-networked native banks equivalent to Deltec Financial institution positioned themselves between the fintech trade and up-and-coming politicos. In 2019, the Central Financial institution of the Bahamas turned one of many first on this planet to start experimenting with a digital forex: the Sand Greenback, issued experimentally within the Exumas and the Abacos. In November 2020, the Bahamian Parliament handed the Digital Belongings and Registered Exchanges Invoice, one of many first items of laws on this planet to supply registration and authorized standing for digital belongings. By 2020, the Bahamas was ranked prime of the crypto regulation league. The explanation that Bankman-Fried would cite for transferring FTX to the Bahamas was the truth that the islands supplied regulation of crypto derivates. The opposite was that the Bahamas operated a comparatively liberal COVID-19 regime, an statement that so far as the Bahamas was involved spelled catastrophe. Nor was it the primary however the second of two disasters that may strike the financial system of the islands in brief succession.

The primary was Hurricane Dorian, which tore by means of the Bahamas in September 2019. A Class 5 storm, it inflicted huge injury to the Abacos and Grand Bahama, to the tune of 25 p.c of Bahamian GDP. Then, solely months later, the pandemic paralyzed the worldwide vacationer financial system. It’s exhausting to think about a extra dramatic mixture of shocks that would have struck the islands. As authorities spending surged and GDP plunged by greater than 16 p.c in 2020, the debt-to-GDP ratio shot above one hundred pc. The newest PLP authorities, which took workplace in Nassau in 2021, was decided to carry its nerve. The speedy COVID-19 reopening that attracted Bankman-Fried was a deliberate coverage to draw vacationer {dollars}, restore GDP, and make the debt burden extra manageable. However in 2022, with the shock of rising oil and meals costs and the sharp hike in U.S. rates of interest, Nassau’s bravado was carrying considerably skinny. Amongst local experts, there may be now resigned speak of the Bahamas needing an IMF program sooner quite than later.

It was this disastrous collection of shocks, towards the backdrop of a disappointing decade, that made the prospect of attracting FTX, valued at greater than $25 billion at its peak, so irresistibly alluring. This was not some discreet offshore monetary deal or a billionaire quietly buying an island. The arrival of FTX in September 2021, with bitcoin reaching a excessive of $66,000 shortly after, turned a fete. Bahamian Prime Minister Philip “Courageous” Davis turned as much as shake Bankman-Fried’s hand and break floor on the location of FTX’s future workplaces in Nassau in April 2022. Its new headquarters, Davis declared final June, could be a “area to rival the Google campus and one for innovation and coaching, attracting Bahamian and worldwide expertise.”

Nor was it simply the native prime brass who had been sucked in. Bankman-Fried lured Invoice Clinton and Tony Blair to the Bahamas together with a variety of roughly critical Wall Road figures. It was a spectacle—imagineering for the cash crowd. And it changed into an embarrassing catastrophe. As 2022 ended, the information in crypto circles was that so-called decentralized autonomous organizations had been dashing to get company registration within the Caymans within the hope of capping their authorized liabilities within the case of additional bankruptcies and litigation.

So far as the Bahamas is worried, nonetheless, FTX was finally a sideshow—only one extra undertaking, alongside many earlier failed international investments, that got here to the islands to die. Because the rankings businesses have declared, the failure of FTX has no material impact on the national bond rating. The truth that a lot political capital was invested within the enterprise was itself a triumph of hope over frequent sense. What issues for the Bahamas is the persevering with rebound in tourism and the native property sector. And that is determined by truthful climate.

With the solar out and the breeze blowing, it’s tempting to dismiss even financial disasters as extreme as these of 2019-20 as a matter of dangerous luck. In any case, the pandemic was incubated in far-off China, and far of the worst hysteria proved to be exaggerated. Dorian was horrible, however within the Caribbean, hurricanes are a truth of life. Although the destruction was horrible, billions of {dollars} in insurance coverage funds flooded in, propping up the Bahamian stability of funds and unleashing an orgy of property offers and development on Grand Bahama and the Abacos. Within the face of pure catastrophe, capitalism continues to operate; certainly, the wheels spin quicker than ever.