The cumulative damage was summed up in the recent Central Bank economic report for 2016, which showed a nine per cent decline in assets of offshore banks.

How come? First, there was the major arrow aimed not simply at Barbados but at several countries around the world, and it came from the new Justin Trudeau administration.

In hiss first budget, Trudeau is planning to spend as much as $800 million on the Canadian Revenue Agency over a five-year period, so it can go after corporations and individuals who park money in low tax jurisdictions like Barbados, The Bahamas, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Ireland, Cyprus, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, the British Virgin Islands, and the Cayman Islands. Their goal is to force taxpayers to fork over more than CAN$10 billion in previously unpaid taxes.

Next was last year’s release of the Panama Papers, the 11.5 million records of a global law firm in Panama City, Mossack Fonseca, whose main business is using national laws and international tax treaties and information exchange agreements between the world’s richest countries and others to allow their clients to cut their tax bills.

Third is the constant international drumbeat against “tax havens” which is forcing corporations and the rich to have second thoughts about where they put their money to avoid paying more taxes than they hand over to international tax agencies.

Oxfam recently released its poorly devised report and unfair list of what it calls the world’s “worst corporate tax havens”, where hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions  of dollars are said to be hidden away from tax authorities in rich and developing countries. It is money which Oxfam argues should be collected and spent on reducing poverty and building infrastructure.

As the British organisation sees it, “the tax havens are starving poor and rich countries out of billions of dollars needed to tackle poverty and inequality”.

It was a listing that shockingly excluded the US, which the Financial Times of London and tax experts in and out of North America and Europe now consider to be the world’s largest “tax haven”.

But Oxfam isn’t alone in directing its gaze on Barbados and other key jurisdictions whose offshore centres engage in perfectly legal financial transactions.

Canadians for Tax Fairness, an organisation that has become a private tax watchdog led by Dennis Hewlett, estimated that in 2015, about CAN$9 billion passed through Barbados; CAN$15 billion went through the Cayman Islands; and CAN$8 billion was channelled through The Bahamas.

In all, at least CAN$40 billion, it charged, was hidden overseas two years ago.

Apparently those figures on foreign investment in Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Europe were taken from numbers compiled by Statistics Canada.

The truth is, though, no one really knows how much money passed through low-tax centres, a point made almost a year ago by Toronto Star investigative journalists.

Interestingly, while the glare was on Barbados, what went unnoticed was that Canada itself was a magnet for offshore money, just like Barbados and the rest of the so-called “tax havens”.

According to the results of the Star investigation and the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada has “quietly emerged as a popular tax haven for the global elite, who create shell companies with figurehead directors to evade or avoid taxes”.

Using a technique labelled “snow washing”, defined as using Canada’s reputation for fiscal prudence and legality in tax matters to attract foreign money, the financial engineers have been promoting Canada, you guessed it, as a “tax haven”.

As a matter of fact, in a series published by the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulating daily paper, the country was described as the “world’s newest tax haven”.

That brings us back to Mossack Fonseca, the law firm in Panama whose papers were surreptitiously purloined and published, triggering a financial earthquake around the world. It stated in a memo as far back as 2010 that “Canada is a good place to create tax planning structures to minimise taxes like interest, dividends, capital gains, retirement income and rental income”. That was one way of marketing the North American economic colossus as a haven whose private commercial financial houses dominate the banking industry across the Caribbean, especially in Barbados, Jamaica, the Cayman and The Bahamas.

So, at a time when Canada’s leader, Trudeau, was urging the international community to unite and curb the activities of tax havens, his country was the “newest” offender.

“A sprawling international tax avoidance industry is increasingly touting Canada as a jurisdiction for hiding wealth,” complained the Star/CBC investigators.

Canada isn’t alone. The US is sailing in the same boat. Take a hard look at South Dakota and what would become clear is that the small state of less than a million souls is also in the business of attracting offshore wealth, just like Barbados and its neighbours, which Washington criticizes. The difference is that Oxfam and others are giving South Dakota, Vermont, Delaware and other states a free hand to compete against Barbados without having to pay the price of negative attention.

“The US is a magnet for offshore wealth, notably South Dakota, which has guaranteed secrecy for family trusts,” the Financial Times of London told its readers in May last year. Today, South Dakota trusts now hold at least US$226 billion in assets, up from US$32 billion in 2006.

“After years of threatening Swiss and other foreign banks that helped Americans hide their money, the US stands accused of providing similar services for the rest of the world,” stated the Financial Times.

Bruce Zagaris, a recognised tax expert in Washington and an adviser to Barbados, also cited South Dakota as a low tax centre of increasing importance.

“If you want to understand what’s happening these days, look at South Dakota,” he said. “It is competing against Barbados.”

Zagaris’ insistence was backed up by David Wilson, a partner in a Swiss law firm.

“America is the new Switzerland,” he said “In the industry, we have known this for several years.”

Chalk up all of this to international hypocrisy that is allowing some countries to be portrayed as tax villains while the US, Canada, and the UK escape international scrutiny.

Barbados’ offshore sector, the Minister of International Business Donville Inniss, Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler, and Opposition Leader Mia Mottley, must prepare themselves for even more scrutiny.