Unfortunately, the offshore business requires more than competent lawyers. Our banking infrastructure is too archaic to pull off the deals mention by Mr. Coulson. Money, securities and derivatives must be moved, bought, sold, traded or issued and the Bahamas is not modern enough to do this.

Mr. Coulson mentions $160 million financing for solar in Jordan. You can bet that the financial institutions have bought and sold CDS or Credit Default Swaps and other sophisticated financial instruments to hedge against large loan defaults. No matter how well schooled the lawyers to do this are, if they do not have the ecosystem to do this, then it is a no-go. Currently, Bahamian lawyers have no clue as to the mechanisms of a real, vibrant financial center. In our jurisdictions, lawyers think that SMART funds are the acme of financial acumen.

Because of the closed shop and the archaic infrastructure, there is no possible way that Bahamian lawyers can compete with the best of the breed in financial centers.

As of 2000, Cuba had 35,000 rooms available for international visitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_i… This attorney is all wet and totally wrong. They do not need a free market system. Their hotels are full of Canadian, British, German and tourists from other countries. Being state owned, the hard currency earned from tourism goes directly to their finance ministry to pay for imports. I have been at a Cuban resort, and they are more than ready. This guy likely has never been.

The bigger question is "Why is UBS selling its headquarters building in the Bahamas?". Anyone care to guess. We know that banking operations have ceased in the Bahamas, but what about Trust Services & Wealth Management? Can anyone read the words of the prophets written on the walls?

Right on.

It's just you. The Canadian government is doing the same thing and relocating remote outposts and settlements in Labrador, Canada. They are paying residents $270,000 each household to move to the nearest big city. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundl… Its a very pragmatic thing to do. Providing services for a few is very expensive.

The trouble is that the government helps the foreigners, but not the Bahamians.

Our financial services are a joke. Many of my clients are transferring their assets to the Cayman Islands. For one, they don't like their cell phone calls monitored.

The sooner that we hit bottom, the sooner we will be able to get rid of the criminal buffoons and start to rebuild on a solid framework.

Once again, I would iterate that none of Mr. Smith's plans would not work, because of corruption in the government, and corruption in the legal marketplace of the Bahamas. Why are not the lawyers and the law society stopping the government from letting the webshops run illegally before the legislation? Why are not the lawyers the voice of democracy?

I understand that Mr. Smith is one such lawyer who got the useless injunction against Blackbeard Cay, but if the corrupt government doesn't respect the courts, it is useless. None of my clients ever want a Bahamian lawyer. First of all, when they come through the door, they are seen as fresh meat to cut steaks off. And the Bahamian legal system is so troglodytic, dinosauric, behind-the-times, crude, unsophisticated, unfair and expensive, that Bahamian lawyers couldn't compete with real professionals and subject matter experts.

Bahamian lawyer s have the worst work ethic, the feeblest of records systems and case management and the least understanding of intricate international law, that they are, for all intents and purposes, useless for anything except being gravy sucking pigs on the pockets of foreigners.

Nobody in government sees the cognitive dissonance in any of this. As a matter of fact, almost nobody sees any problem with this at all. This shows how much the Bahamian ethical compass is skewed and why no one in the international community respects us professionally in the financial services industry. We are children of a lesser god through and through, and we show it daily.