EU censors list of tax havens

The Council of the European Union has recently made a controversial decision to remove Cayman Island from its list of non-cooperative jurisdictions on tax matters (synonymous with the tax ha-vens). Due to the recent changes in the European “black list”, you can find such exotic species as Barbados, Anguilla, Trinidad and Tobago, Fiji, Samoa, American Samoa, Guam, Palau, Ameri-can Virgin Islands, Panama, Seychelles and Wanuatu.

Meanwhile, according to the Corporate Tax Haven Index 2019, the British Virgin Islands are ranked 1st on the list of tax havens, Bermuda in 2nd, and Cayman Islands removed from the EU’s list in 3rd. In this ranking, however, neither Trinidad and Tobago, nor Fiji, Samoa, American Sa-moa, Guam, Palau, the American Virgin Islands, Wanuatu, and even Barbados just added to the list can be found in any of the top 64 places.

On the other hand, Anguilla is ranked 35th, Seychelles 44th and Panama 26th. For comparison, Poland is ranked 53th on this list.

There are also countries that belong to the European Union at the top of the list of tax havens. The Netherlands is just behind the podium, Luxembourg is in 6th, Ireland is 11th, Belgium is 16th, Cy-prus is 18th, and Hungary is 20th. It is fairly safe to say that the Community is currently having major problems formulating a coherent and effective anti-tax avoidance strategy.

According to the report of the Polish Economic Institute, the value of losses resulting from the op-eration of tax havens in the European Union alone amounts to a total of €170 billion per year. The total losses resulting from tax avoidance over the period of seven years amount to €1.19 trillion. Meanwhile, the liabilities resulting from the EU budget adopted for the years 2014-2020 amount to a total of €959.5 billion. In 2017, Poland alone lost about PLN 3 billion (8 percent of all CIT rev-enues) through the transfers of profits of international companies to tax havens, according to a report by economists Gabriel Zucman, Ludvig Wier and Thomas Tørsløv.

Source; wbj.pl