Jun 01 - Poland Removes Gibraltar From Its “Tax Haven Lists"
Poland is the latest country to have removed Gibraltar from its “tax haven list” – a schedule of countries and territories that it considers to be non-cooperative and therefore discriminated against.
Poland now joins a number of other countries – namely Canada, Estonia and Italy - that have taken similar measures to recognise Gibraltar as an internationally cooperative jurisdiction in the area of tax information exchange.
As a result, this relieves Gibraltar-registered companies from previously held restrictions or restrictive measures.
This follows the steps taken by the Government of Gibraltar to ensure compliance with international standards and to extend its network of tax information exchange agreements including through the Multilateral Convention, the adoption of the Common Reporting Standard, the further bilateral exchange agreements and the FATCA arrangements with the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
A further two countries have confirmed to the Gibraltar authorities that they are in the process of internal legislative or parliamentary procedures to remove Gibraltar from their lists of countries with preferential tax regimes or similar schedules that attract countermeasures. These will be made public as and when these countries confirm these procedures have been completed.
The Ministry for Financial Services continues to focus on and lobby a further small number of countries calling upon them with the support of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to remove Gibraltar from any lists discriminating against the Jurisdiction.
The Minister with responsibility for Financial Services, the Hon Albert Isola said, “I, with the support of senior officials from my Ministry, have been working very hard over the last two years to ensure that those countries with which we have effective tax information exchange but continued to have us on so called ‘Tax Haven’ lists, recognise our internationally cooperative stance and remove us from such lists.
“I am delighted that in recent months Poland, Canada, Estonia and Italy have done so with a further two countries at a well advanced stage.
“We continue to target the small number of remaining jurisdictions that, unfairly, still list us despite the effectiveness of our information sharing with them.”
{fcomment}
