Details

Titel

Post-Panama reflections: Black, white and grey lists

Ist Teil von

• International tax review, 2016-04

Ort / Verlag

London: Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

EBSCOhost Business Source Ultimate

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The fallout from the "Panama Papers" is driving greater transparency. The use of offshore financial centres can be traced to the supply of Switzerland's wealth management services and the demand for these from European countries like the UK, France and Germany where income tax rates started increasing in the 1920s. In the 1980s several tax havens appeared. Using such offshore centres can be entirely legitimate and in countries such as Russia and Ukraine, residents put their assets offshore to defend them from "raids" by criminals, and to get around hard currency restrictions. Others use offshore structures for reasons of inheritance and estate planning. The use of tax havens by corporates has also grown with technological change that made it easy for income to be shown as accruing to jurisdictions even without there being any substance. Based on the internationally agreed tax standard, the OECD has formulated white, grey and black lists. The white-list includes jurisdictions that have implemented the internationally agreed tax standards and are therefore not considered to be a tax haven by the OECD. Of the nations the OECD asked to sign on, only a handful have declined: namely Bahrain, Nauru, Panama, Vanuatu - and the US. The issue of accessing beneficial ownership information is on the agenda of the Financial Action Task Force, the EU, the G20 and civil society NGOs.