St. Kitts & Nevis Prime Minister Denzil Douglas. *File photo

Roseau, Dominica: The issue of eight Caribbean countries being blacklisted by France was discussed, as CARICOM heads met with World Bank President Robert Zoellick at the 21st intersessional CARICOM Summit currently ongoing.

France named 18 nations as being uncooperative tax havens and threatened to impose higher taxes on French companies that have operations in those jurisdictions. Anguilla, Belize, Grenada, Montserrat, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines were the other Caribbean countries on that blacklist.

Prime Minister of St Kitts and Nevis Denzel Douglas, who is on island, told a media interview last evening that France’s action was unfair.

According to him, Zoellick was told that he should use his contact and influence with France to ask for some flexibility in having the country revisit its position, before January 2011.

“I alluded to the situation where we have been given a target date of March 31^st to achieve 12 agreements with the OECD countries and before we could achieve that, France imposed a black listing against and took punitive action against companies that may be doing business in the Caribbean,” Douglas said.

“We felt that it was unfair because several of us has already negotiated terms and agreements with France and we were waiting for France to give dates for signing those agreements and then one week before she took this unilateral action,” he added.

Meantime, Douglas says for small indebted countries to continue on their development agenda – especially in stabilizing the economies – the World Bank should use its position to assist in accessing concessionary terms in loans.

He said the World Bank needs to be mindful of the vulnerabilities of small highly indebted middle income countries.

He believes the economic transformation path is being made more difficult.