Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

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

The AFP reported that Prime Minister Juncker attacked the USA by saying "The G20 has no credibility as an undertaking if Delaware, Wyoming or Nevada or far-flung islands from the United States are not on the blacklist. If there must be a blacklist then, America should have its place on it."

It is true that the USA have their own tax havens that are not targetted by the Stop tax haven Abused Act. They definitely should be.

But Prime Minister Juncker forgets that his jurisdiction is not so targetted by the USA : it was not under the US Senate investigation on tax havens.

By acting like that Prime Minister Juncker could incitate the USA to investigate on the Luxembourg issues :
- Clearstream,
- the small number of criminal cases before the courts that is said "telling" for a jurisdiction that has such a large financial center (See the Narcotics Control Strategy Reports of the last years)
- ...

By the way, Minister Frieden ("peace" in german) went to the USA a couple of days ago.
By attacking now the USA Prime Minister Juncker reveals the weakness of Luxembourg as American people were not convinced.