Chief minister Tony Brown told a reporter for the Isle of Man Today website that even though the IoM is not a part of the European Union, decisions made there “can have a big influence on us”, and that for this reason, “having an office there will give us an opportunity to lobby on these issues”.
‘We are progressing this and I very much welcome the support for the government’s initiative to take this forward,” Brown told the IoM Today.
“We will take a decision within six months.’
As reported here last month, official talk of a Brussels office began after a Manx parliamentarian posted a question to the chief minister about the possibility of a permanent office in Brussels. This followed an announcement in March by Jersey and Guernsey, the IoM’s crown dependency siblings, that they were in talks about opening a shared Brussels office.
Guernsey and Jersey already make use of the same lobbying firm in Brussels, the well-known and politically-connected Brunswick Group.
The Isle of Man employs White and Case, a law firm, in a similar capacity.
The interest in setting up full-time lobbying offices in Brussels is seen as a response to growing pressure on so-called offshore financial centres by G20 countries, which are scrutinising what some regard as “predatory” corporate tax rates at a time when their ballooning budget deficits are forcing them to find new revenue sources.
In particular, the so-called zero-10 corporate tax regimes of the crown dependencies are being examined by the European Union, whose members tend to have much higher corporate tax rates. Under zero-10 regimes, most companies pay no corporate tax, though some sectors such as banking pay 10%.
Until now the Isle of Man has strongly resisted pressure to alter its zero-10 regime, which was one of the first to be established, but recently it announced it was looking into whether it might be in its best interest to change this.
Meantime, the IoM Today noted, the island’s financial services is not the only industry that would benefit from a permanent Brussels office – its fisheries and farming sectors might also benefit.
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In other news, the Isle of Man today revealed it has introduced new regulations aimed at allowing publicly traded companies to purchase and hold a maximum of 10% of their own shares in treasury, in a move that it said would make listed IoM companies more competitive.
The regulations enable IoM companies to reduce the costs of capital maintenance because they enable them to repurchase and hold shares as treasury shares, instead of having to cancel them on repurchase.
