BASSETERRE, St. Kitts -- Following its latest round of updates, the European Union has removed three Caribbean jurisdictions from its blacklist of territories it deems as "non-cooperative jurisdictions for tax purposes."
On Tuesday (Feb. 20), the EU identified the Bahamas, Belize, and the Turks and Caicos as the jurisdictions removed from the blacklist due to updates to their tax laws, bringing them into compliance with the European body’s recommendations.
While those were removed, three more remain on the list, including Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, and Trinidad and Tobago. They join American Samoa, Fiji, Guam, Palau, Panama, Russia, Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and Vanuatu, who were also on the list.
In its statement, the EU noted that the jurisdictions were not yet "cooperative on tax matters" and invited them to improve their legal framework to resolve the identified issues.
Meanwhile, the EU noted that the 12 jurisdictions "either have not engaged in a constructive dialogue with the EU on tax governance or have failed to deliver on their commitments to implement the necessary reforms."
According to the EU, the reforms aim to comply "with a set of objective tax good governance criteria, which include tax transparency, fair taxation, and implementation of international standards designed to prevent tax base erosion and profit shifting."
In the case of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands, the EU said that the recommendations to both jurisdictions to remedy these deficiencies "were converted from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ recommendations, which allowed the Code of Conduct Group to consider these jurisdictions compliant with the standard for jurisdictions with no or only a nominal corporate income tax."
The EU stated that Belize and Seychelles were included in the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions for tax purposes after a negative assessment from the OECD Global Forum regarding the exchange of information on request. Following changes to the applicable rules in these jurisdictions, the Global Forum has granted them both a supplementary review, which will be undertaken in the near future.
The list is said to be revised again in October of this year.
