The European Union has further reduced its meager blacklist tax havens just 48 hours after the publication of the so-called Pandora Papers. The EU Economy and Finance Ministers (Ecofin), meeting in Luxembourg, have left the list in only nine jurisdictions despite the latest revelation showing once again the enormous scale of tax evasion, a scandal that has plagued leaders of several countries of the Union and even a former member of the European Commission.
Even so, the list of tax havens of the European Union has lost three members on Tuesday. In their latest review of this black panel, the 27 have taken out the Seychelles, Anguilla, and Dominica, bringing their total number down to nine. This decision comes just 48 hours after the publication of the Pandora Papers, which have uncovered 11 million secret files of 14 law firms specialized in the creation of opaque companies in tax havens, some of them such as Panama or the Virgin Islands do appear on the EU list.
This movement has deserved the reproach of the large groups in the European Parliament, where this Wednesday the matter will be debated. “The EU list of tax havens has no fangs. The plan of the EU finance ministers to further dilute the EU blacklist this week is precisely the wrong signal, ”criticized Markus Ferber, economic spokesman for the popular group.
“Today’s update to the list is deeply disappointing.[…] It cannot be that some decisions are made based on technical criteria and others only on political criteria. Turkey receives preferential treatment, the US remains excluded despite failing to comply with the information exchange criteria. Since its creation in 2017, this list has had a positive impact in some areas, but it is time to go further ”, added the Spanish MEP of En Comú Podem, Ernest Urtasun.
The list just released includes, in addition to Panama and the Virgin Islands, to Fiji, Guam, Palau, Trinidad and Tobago, Vanuatu, Samoa and the US territory of the same name, American Samoa. Since the end of 2017, the European Union has published a list of what it considers tax havens and reviews it every six months. In this time it has been reduced by half, it started with 18 members and since then countries such as Andorra, the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas have come out. Others like Dominica, Barbados or Anguilla have come and gone.
Another country that has been incorporated and excluded on several occasions from the list is Panama, which appeared at the time of its creation after the scandal of the Panama Papers, but that he managed to get out of the spotlight after the Twenty-seven considered that he was fulfilling his commitments regarding transparency. The EU changed its mind in 2020, when it judged that the country had not yet complied with “the tax reforms to which it had committed” with the member states.
From the beginning, the list has been criticized for having too strict inclusion criteria. The NGO Intermon Oxfam has strongly criticized the EU decision. “The blacklist the EU should penalize true tax havens. However, it sets them free, ”Íñigo Macías, the NGO’s research coordinator, said in a note. In his opinion, the “decision today [por este martes] to remove from this list Anguilla, the only jurisdiction left with a 0% tax rate on corporate profits, and the Seychelles, a jurisdiction implicated in the latest of the US tax leaks. Pandora Papers ” makes the “blacklist of the EU becomes irrelevant and ineffective, difficult to take seriously ”. “The EU is turning a blind eye to the operation of true tax havens,” says the NGO, which also regrets that while “the super-rich continue to use tax havens to avoid paying their taxes, they continue to move on the set of families the effort to face the fiscal cost involved in recovering from covid-19 ″.