EU ministers remove Panama and 7 others from tax haven blacklist

BRUSSELS - 23 January 2018: European Union finance ministers confirmed on Tuesday that eight jurisdictions were removed from the bloc’s blacklist of tax havens, one month after the list was set up.

Barbados, Grenada, the Republic of Korea, Macao, Mongolia, Panama, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates are the jurisdictions that have been delisted “following commitments made at a high political level to remedy EU concerns,” the EU said in a statement.

The move is in line with recommendations by EU tax experts, the so-called Code of Conduct Group.

The detailed commitments made by the eight jurisdictions have not been made public, despite calls to do so by the EU tax commissioner Pierre Moscovici.

EU states decided last month to draw up the blacklist in a bid to discourage the most aggressive tax dodging practices after several disclosures of off-shore schemes, including the Panama Papers.

Jurisdictions that remain on the blacklist are American Samoa, Bahrain, Guam, the Marshall Islands, Namibia, Palau, Saint Lucia, Samoa, and Trinidad and Tobago.