No more will the Cayman Islands be called names like “notorious”, “crooked”, “secretive”, “nefarious”, etc.

No longer can we be called “A tax haven”.

Almost overnight Cayman has become squeaky clean.

Every door in all those buildings in Cayman’s capital George Town, especially Ugland House, made famous by  US President Barack Obama a few years ago, and more recently, Jack Lew, during his confirmation hearings to become Secretary of the Treasury, scream as if in pain as they are opened and closed.

Ugland House, a five-story office building that, according to a 2008 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), houses 18,857 corporations, about half of which have billing addresses back in the States.

“Either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world,” said Obama just four years ago.

The days of international law firms in the Caymans greasing the wheels of large corporations seem to be over.

As one of our stories in iNews Cayman today says, “With the U.S. signing Friday of a mutual agreement to turn over the names of account holders to each other’s tax authorities, the Cayman Islands’ long history as one of the favorite – and most notorious – shelters of unreported income in the Western Hemisphere came to an end.”

So what will this mean now for us here?

Is our whole banking centre going to collapse as 30,000 plus corporations move out?

But where will they go?

Will they all go broke when Cayman reveals how much tax these companies have evaded? Will the persons behind this evasion, if it is found they are breaking their countries laws, be prosecuted and end up in prison?

Greece’s economic team are already preparing a law that will send tax evaders to prison even if they pay their debts.

Will other countries do the same?

Will all movable and immovable property and assets of those arrested for tax evasion, for money laundering and false income declarations about where they found the money will be immediately confiscated? In Greece that will happen if the law gets passed.

Or will our teams of clever financiers find other inventive ways, legal of course, how their clients can still hide their real worth from the probing eyes of those nasty tax officials?

I hope so for our country’s sake.

There’s a price for becoming squeaky clean.