On Tuesday 13 March, the finance ministers of the European Union will remove Bahrain, the Marshall Islands and St Lucia from the EU's blacklist of non-cooperative jurisdictions in taxation matters, according to a document of the corporate taxation code of conduct group of the Council of the EU, of which EUROPE has had sight.
The problems raised by Bahrain principally concerned transparency. The country did not carry out an automatic exchange of fiscal information with all member states and was not a signatory of the OECD multilateral Convention on mutual administrative assistance. The conclusions of the Ecofin Council of December last year also state that Bahrain facilitated offshore structures and arrangements aiming to attract the profits of companies, with no actual economic substance. Finally, Bahrain had not undertaken to implement the OECD's measures to tackle base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS).
The Marshall Islands had made commitments concerning transparency, but not to apply BEPS or to cease facilitating offshore structures.
Finally, St Lucia had harmful regimes, did not apply BEPS and had not clearly undertaken to resolve these problems by the end of 2018.
The Council also had to update its conclusions from December, as Malaysia and the Labuan Islands have explicitly reiterated commitments they have made, as they did not do in December. Of the countries recently hit by hurricanes and given extra time to submit their commitments, all but the US Virgin Islands have made submissions, but there is reportedly no consensus on the assessment of them; the committee of permanent representatives will therefore discuss them this Wednesday 7 March. (Original version in French by Élodie Lamer)