Council of the EU updates EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions

On 22 February 2021, the Council of the EU decided to add Dominica and remove Barbados from the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions for tax purposes (‘EU list’).

In the view of the Council of the EU, the inclusion of Dominica in the EU list was due to the ratings recently released by OECD Global Forum for Transparency and Exchange of Information (‘Global Forum’) as regards exchange of information on request, wherein the said jurisdiction was rated as “partially compliant”.

The decision to remove Barbados from the EU list was taken due to the fact that it has been granted a supplementary review by the Global Forum and has consequently been moved to a state-of-play document by the Council of the EU pending the outcome of such review.

As a result, as of 22 February 2021, the EU list contains the following non-cooperative jurisdictions:

• American Samoa,
  
• Anguilla,
  
• Dominica,
  
• Fiji,
  
• Guam,
  
• Palau,
  
• Panama,
  
• Samoa,
  
• Seychelles,
  
• Trinidad and Tobago,
  
• the US Virgin Islands, and
  
• Vanuatu.

The EU list was first proposed by the EU Commission in 2016 as an effective tool to deal with external risks of tax abuse and unfair tax competition and was established in December 2017. Since then, it has become a strong tool to promote tax good governance on an international basis. As part of the listing process, jurisdictions are assessed against three key criteria: tax transparency, fair taxation and the implementation of the OECD base erosion and profit shifting minimum standards.

The Council of the EU’s official press release may be accessed here.