McTaggart is managing partner of KPMG in Grand Cayman, and has worked in the islands’ financial services industry for more than 25 years.
His letter last Thursday to Ronnie Campbell, MP for Nothumberland, in turn drew fire from Richard Murphy, a UK-based tax campaigner and head of Tax Research UK. In a blog on his organisation’s website yesterday, Murphy took issue with McTaggart’s claim that Cayman is “a fully transparent jurisdiction and not a place where individuals or corporations are able to hide money”.
“I’d have hoped that after the excesses of the [Anthony] Travers years, that a new chair of Cayman Finance might have toned down the rhetoric, and might even have realised the folly of tilting against windmills," Murphy added. "But apparently not.”
McTaggart, Murphy said, “seems determined to continue in the tradition of his predecessor”.
‘Factually inaccurate’
In his letter to Campbell, which was distributed to the press and picked up by a number of Cayman Islands media organisations, McTaggart said the MP’s comment made in the Commons the day before, with respect to "multinational companies and banks hiding their money in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands", was "factually inaccurate".
He added: "Perpetuating such falsehoods does a disservice to the enormous economic benefits bestowed upon UK companies by their use of Cayman structures and therefore to your constituent tax payers."
As reported, Travers, who is chairman of the Cayman Islands Stock Exchange, unexpectedly stepped down from the Cayman Finance chairmanship earlier this month, officially giving no reason but suggesting that his work at the organisation was done after two years in the role.
Cayman Finance officials said McTaggart would provide the marketing organisation with “required strategic direction until a permanent chairman is found”.
An executive committee has also been established to assist McTaggart, in addition to dealing with unspecified “organizational issues”, Cayman Finance added.
During his stint at Cayman Finance, Travers, a former senior partner of the Maples & Calder law firm, was an outspoken defender of the Caymans, which he saw as a favourite scapegoat of American and British politicians seeking to redirect public ire from domestic problems. Most recently he took issue with what he said was an untrue characterisation of the Cayman Islands’ funds industry as being in the progress of migrating to Dublin.
