IB BOOST urged

More persons are choosing to set up their businesses in Barbados.

President of the Barbados International Business (IB) Association, Julia Hope revealed this to The Barbados Advocate during an interview on the sidelines of the Invest Barbados Secondary Schools’ Symposium, which took place at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre yesterday morning.

“We are doing well in spite of deficiencies, and we do have deficiencies, and through talking to practitioners in the field we are getting a lot of businesses who are choosing to domicile in Barbados which is good news but we need to do more,” she said.

“We are waiting for some pieces of legislation to be amended. In particular, the legislation coming from the OECD and the EU regarding Substance, which talks about certain categories of activities that must have employees based in Barbados. Now the reason we are waiting for the legislation to be amended is because it was brought into force when it was needed but there are some tweaks that are needed. We are waiting on the guidelines so that we understand the true nature of that and can inform the clients,” it was explained.

Hope stated that this piece of legislation was good for Barbados. She noted however, that this was something businesses were doing in Barbados, as it is one of the jurisdictions that have geared themselves to having employees in the building, and the legislation will make it even more apparent.

It is against this backdrop that she considers this piece of legislation to be a benefit to Barbados as it gives Barbados the place to be able to market as a place with great human capital.

She went on to add that she believed persons were now starting to understand the importance of international business sector in terms of foreign exchange, however she believed that more needed to be done to in order to get Barbadians really on board with what the sector really did, such as generate a significant amount of money in terms of revenue for the Government in terms of corporation tax, as well as the side benefits to taxis and hoteliers through persons needing to visit Barbados in order attend to business.