19 June 2015 Insurance

Guernsey surprised at blacklisting

Guernsey’s chief minister, Deputy Jonathan Le Tocq, has expressed astonishment that Guernsey has been included as one of 30 jurisdictions on a tax blacklist.

The list consolidates national tax ‘blacklists’ as they stood six months ago, and includes any jurisdiction on ten or more Member States’ lists.

In a statement, Guernsey Finance said it is only included on nine blacklists and has been included because Sark, a small Island for which it has no legal responsibility in tax matters, appears on another blacklist.

Le Tocq said: “The Commission appears to have hurriedly put together a list of so-called ‘non-cooperative’ non-EU jurisdictions using some very arbitrary criteria. It is this type of arbitrary and inconsistent use of ‘blacklists’ that international standards are supposed to be replacing, so this seems to me to run counter to what the Commission itself is trying to do on tax transparency.

“It also runs counter to Commissioner Moscovici’s own positive views on Guernsey, which we discussed just over a month ago.

“I have written to Commissioner Moscovici today to express Guernsey’s disappointment and surprise that we are on this list, and to ask him to have Guernsey removed from it as soon as possible.

“The fact remains that we lead a number of EU Member States on tax transparency and cooperation, and we will be partners of the EU in the automatic exchange of information under the Common Reporting Standard. This means we are well ahead of the full EU 28 – and yet we have been erroneously placed on an arbitrarily defined blacklist. Our priority is to be removed from this list.”

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