EU tax blacklist for Guernsey - but not for Jersey

Thursday 18 June 2015

Guernsey has been placed on an EU tax “blacklist”.

The island’s Chief Minister Jonathan Le Tocq has expressed “shock and disappointment” over the move, and has requested that the EU remove Guernsey from the list of “non-cooperative tax jurisdictions”.

The move comes just weeks after EU Commissioner Pierre Moscovici met Deputy Le Tocq and Jersey’s Chief Minister Ian Gorst, and praised their work on financial services regulation.

At the time, Mr Moscovici said: “I very much welcome the active engagement of the Channel Islands in the key initiatives involved in the fight against tax evasion, fraud and abusive tax avoidance in which they are important partners of the EU.”

Deputy Le Tocq has released a letter that he sent to the Commissioner on Twitter – in it he wrote that the black-listing was an error. He says that the countries that appear on the list have each been included ten times on lists of un-cooperative jurisdictions by EU member states.

But Deputy Le Tocq says that Guernsey has only been included on nine lists – and that the EU has mistakenly added Sark’s listings to Guernsey’s, taking them over the threshold.

He wrote that the Isle of Man and Gibraltar – like Guernsey – were on nine lists, but were not on the “black-list” released yesterday.

Deputy Le Tocq’s letter said: “On the above basis I expect that the Commission will agree to removing Guernsey from the list of ‘non-cooperative jurisdictions’ with immediate effect.

“If it does not do so, the Commission is sending out a clear signal that meeting the highest international standards of tax transparency does not make a jurisdiction ‘co-operative’ – hardly an incentive for other jurisdictions to aspire to the highest international jurisdictions which we in Guernsey meet.”