Cayman Islands, Palau, Panama and Seychelles added to the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions

This happened after assessment of the implementation commitments made by each jurisdiction at the end of 2018. The deadline for implementing the commitments was the end of 2019 and finished with the following results:

• The Cayman Islands does not have appropriate measures in place relating to economic substance requirements for collective investment vehicles.
• Palau failed to implement any automatic exchange of financial information measures.
• Panama failed to obtain at least a “Largely Compliant” rating from the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes for Exchange of Information on Request.
• Seychelles was moved to the blacklist, for failure to address issues in relation to existing harmful preferential tax regimes.

Since the first EU blacklist was published in December 2017, it has been revised twelve times. Following this latest revision, the EU blacklist comprises of twelve jurisdictions: American Samoa, the Cayman Islands, Fiji, Guam, Oman, Palau, Panama, Samoa, Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago, the US Virgin Islands and Vanuatu.