04/03/2009
The sword of Damoclès
The OECD has defined its blacklist of non-cooperative tax havens : Costa Rica, Malaysia, the Philippines and Uruguay.
A separate "grey list" of countries that have agreed to improve transparency standards but have not yet signed the every necessary international agreements : this list is split : on the one hand "Tax havens" and on the other hand "Other financial centers"
Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland are not on the tax haven grey list as they recently withdrew their reservations to Article 26 of the OECD Model Tax Convention. Belgium has already written to 48 countries to propose the conclusion of protocols to update Article 26 of their existing treaties. Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland announced that they have started to write to their treaty partners to indicate that they are now willing to enter into renegotiations of their treaties to include the new Article 26.
Should one of these jurisdiction not respect its commitments in the next couple of weeks it should move to the tax haven list.
Read OECD lists
07:04 Posted in General | Permalink | Comments (0)