THE HAGUE, Dec. 28 (Xinhua) -- In addition to the blacklist of the European Union the Netherlands has drawn up its own list of low-tax jurisdictions to help implement new measures to combat tax avoidance, the Dutch government announced on Friday.
"By drawing up its own stringent blacklist, the Netherlands is once again showing that it is serious in its fight against tax avoidance," said State Secretary for Finance Menno Snel in a press release. "And that's just one of the steps we're taking".
The Dutch list contains five jurisdictions that are already blacklisted by the European Union (American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, Samoa, and Trinidad and Tobago and includes another 16 low-tax jurisdictions (Anguilla, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Belize, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, the Cayman Islands, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Vanuatu and the United Arab Emirates).
The mentioned jurisdictions either have no corporation tax or have a corporation tax rate that is lower than 9 percent. On Dec. 5, 2017 the European Union already published its first own first ever tax haven blacklist of 17 non-cooperative tax jurisdictions to fight tax evasion and avoidance, aiming to create a stronger deterrent for countries that according to the EU "consistently refuse to play fair on tax matters".
Following commitments made at a high political level to remedy the EU concerns as a result of the pressure felt by being on the list several jurisdictions were already removed from the EU list early this year.
The Dutch list will from now on be updated each year, while the EU list will be updated again in the first quarter of 2019. If, in the future, other jurisdictions are added to the EU list that are not on the Dutch list, the measures will also apply to these jurisdictions.
