The European Union on Tuesday added Antigua, Barbuda, Belize and Seychelles to its list of tax havens and removed Costa Rica from a list that humanitarian group Oxfam described as “toothless.”
The list, approved by EU finance ministers at their meeting in Luxembourg, includes 16 jurisdictions considered “uncooperative” for tax purposes.
Countries on the list, which is updated twice a year, face limited sanctions, including exclusion from European aid or development financing.
The EU list already includes American Samoa, Anguilla, the Bahamas, Fiji, Guam, Palau, Panama, Russia, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the US Virgin Islands and Vanuatu.
Now, the European Union has removed Costa Rica, the British Virgin Islands and the Marshall Islands from its list.
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The European Commission (the EU’s executive arm) announced that Costa Rica had been removed from the list because it had made amendments to “harmful aspects of its exemption regime for income from foreign sources.”
Meanwhile, Oxfam criticized the list because it did not include countries such as the United States and Great Britain.
“How long will the EU continue this pointless practice? The list is ineffective,” said Chiara Buttatoro, an EU tax expert at Oxfam.
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“It leaves non-tax countries like the British Virgin Islands out of the woods and fails to consider countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, along with EU tax havens like Luxembourg and Malta,” Butatoro added in a statement.
The European Union cannot unite its member states.
The list was created in 2017 in the wake of a series of scandals, including the Panama Papers, which pressured the European Union to crack down on tax evasion by the wealthy.
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