European Finance Ministers unanimously decided on Tuesday 12 March to update the European list of jurisdictions outside the European Union that are non-cooperative for tax purposes, adding ten new countries to the five already included.
The following countries were added: Aruba, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Dominica, Fiji, Marshall Islands, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Vanuatu. Italy has thus withdrawn its reservations concerning the fate of the United Arab Emirates.
These ten jurisdictions are in addition to the following countries already on the list: American Samoa, Guam, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago and the United States Virgin Islands.
Romanian Finance Minister Eugen Teodorovici stated that the updated European list was the result of close monitoring at the level of the relevant EU Council expert group with the technical support of the European Commission.
"The objective of the list is to encourage positive change", not to ‘name and shame’ a country by pointing it out, said the current President of the Ecofin Council, stressing the "dynamic" nature of the process.
However, the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU had indicated at the opening of the ministerial meeting that no agreement would be reached on Tuesday. According to one European source, it was even the only Member State in session to plead for a postponement of a ministerial decision until May. The reason for this is the late receipt of new commitments, in particular from Barbados.
Appearing together before the press, the French and German ministers welcomed the EU's commitment to fight tax evasion, which, according to Mr Le Maire, “kills democracies”. “If we would not have acted together, we would not have changed anything in the practices of these countries”, Scholz said.
On behalf of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis welcomed the update of the European blacklist, on which three countries - Barbados, the Marshall Islands and the United Arab Emirates - were once again included, although they had been included for some time on the 'grey' list of countries committed to changing their tax rules.
Mr Dombrovskis noted that the 'grey' list now contains "44 countries". This includes Switzerland, which, according to the European Commissioner for Taxation, Pierre Moscovici, has done everything it was supposed to do, but has yet to ratify the commitments made.
For Mr Moscovici, the success of the European approach lies in the fact that, thanks to a process with a "transparent" and "fair" methodology, "60 countries in the world have changed their tax legislation". However, he regretted the absence of European sanctions, while noting that European funds can no longer transit through the countries targeted.
Oxfam criticised the fact that the EU completely dropped "five of the world’s worst tax havens" from the list, citing Panama, Hong Kong, Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey.
See the black and ‘grey’ lists of countries specified by the EU: https://bit.ly/2TCw9CF. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion, Marion Fontana and Lucas Tripoteau)