Dame Margaret Hodge is a colourful, brilliant and confident Member of Parliament for the London Borough of Islington, the place from where my father emigrated. There has been a recent war of words in Britain’s House of Commons as both she and fellow Labour MP Chris Bryan, of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, expressed disgust over the three-year delay to force Overseas Territories to publish ownership registers of companies incorporated in their jurisdictions.

While we may not be independent, my reply to Dame Margaret is that the British Empire no longer exists and the UK needs to get its own house in order first before interfering in our major pillar of economy, which is international business.

It is unrealistic for Britain to expect the developed world to implement public registers by 2023. By all means Britain can lead by example by being the first nation to legislate and introduce a functioning and publicly available register of true beneficial owners. Yet this may well be all pomp and no substance. For example, Reuters reported at the end of 2017 that the body that oversees British corporate records does not have the resources to verify the information submitted to it. In fact, Transparency International researchers reported that between 2004 and 2017, British shell companies had been linked to 52 money-laundering scandals involving £80 billion! That happened on British turf.

Interestingly, it is not only Britain that overreaches, but also the European Union. The EU is hypocritical, too, as one third of shell companies and banking secrecy services are sourced within Europe. Tax Justice Network reported in September 2018 that “it is hard to call the EU’s tax haven blacklist an effective firewall against economic threats when it fails to detect 99 per cent of the financial secrecy threatening member states”.

Four of the top ten suppliers of financial secrecy to the EU are members of the bloc themselves. Then there is Danske Bank being investigated for processing €200 billion (about $227 billion) in suspicious transactions from Russia and other former Soviet countries through its Estonia branch, and Deutsche Bank processed four fifths of the transactions funnelled by Danske.

I hope Dame Margaret supports dialogue with our premier and finance minister. In 1980, Bermuda earned 80 per cent of its money from tourism and 20 per cent from international business. Today 80 per cent of our gross national income is from international business and only 20 per cent from tourism. It would be good to better balance our economic model, and perhaps Dame Margaret could assist Bermuda by removing the existing monopoly enjoyed by British Airways. The airline charges an exorbitant cost that robs our island’s ability of drawing the European market to visit as tourists. The price gouging of the Gatwick-to-Bermuda route is scandalous. But to be clear, we have as an island put ourselves in a tight corner when it comes to how reliant we are on international business.

In all fairness to Bermuda, though, there has been a huge paradigm shift in our approach to collecting “Know Your Customer” documentation mandated by the Bermuda Monetary Authority on the island’s corporate service providers. I would venture to say that Bermuda is one of the most motivated and compliant jurisdictions in comparison with Britain, the EU and the United States.

By no means are we perfect because in the past it was up to businesses to ensure that “dirty clients” are not serviced. Now service providers can be fined up to $250,000 for not collecting proper due diligence. Bermuda pioneered advanced anti-money laundering and antiterrorism legislation, and will soon be adopting substance legislation. Furthermore, newly incorporated international companies must reveal their source of wealth.

Bermuda will never publish beneficial owners’ registers because it would have a dire effect on the economy and on our people.

Recently, Bloomberg reported that many US multinational corporations are beginning to open subsidiaries in low-tax, rather than no-tax, countries because they are seen as being more legitimate — such as Singapore, Ireland and the Netherlands.

Bermuda should take this seriously and consider grandfathering in the exempted companies that have tax assurance certificates to 2035 and introduce tax legislation of 1.5 per cent or 2 per cent on dividends declared by newly incorporated international companies.

This would defy the argument that we are a tax haven and it should satisfy the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Most importantly, the additional income from this tax would enable Bermuda to pay down its national debt and support the health and social programmes as well as the sports and youth centre facilities that our citizens are deprived of at present as a result of not taxing international business.

• Cheryl Pooley is a social commentator and three-times former parliamentary candidate