Luxembourg, Cyprus, Switzerland fail tax transparency test: OECD

Luxembourg, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, Switzerland and the Seychelles do not meet international standards on tax transparency, potentially putting investments in the countries at risk, a global tax forum said on Friday.
The five either failed to share taxpayer information with other countries or to gather information on beneficial ownership of corporate entities registered on their territory, or both, said the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes.
Pascal Saint-Amans, director of tax policy at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which oversees the forum, said big international companies, banks and agencies may now think twice about investing through these jurisdictions.
"It is a question of reputation... There will be pressure on companies to explain why they are doing business in jurisdictions which are not clean from a Global Forum perspective," he said.
The Group of 20 leading economies, which has asked the OECD to lead efforts on curbing international tax evasion and avoidance, has said it wants to put pressure on "non-co-operative jurisdictions".
Luxembourg, which EU sources said is under investigation by the European Commission for tax deals it has cut with major multinationals, said it considered the rating to be "excessively harsh".
It said in a statement that a "very limited number" of its responses to requests for information had been considered to be unsatisfactory.
The Financial Secretary of the British Virgin Islands, Neil Smith, said the rating did not accurately reflect the current practices in the BVI since 2012.
"Unfortunately this classification misses the mark. It does not give an accurate reflection of the standards of tax information sharing found in the BVI," he said. Cyprus and Seychelles government representatives did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
Earlier this year, German politicians demanded improved transparency in Cyprus's banking sector, long seen as having weak controls against money laundering, as a condition for providing bailout funds.
Luxembourg, Cyprus, the Seychelles and the BVI failed the test because the legislative structures they put in place did not function well enough, Saint-Amans said Switzerland failed because it did not have the required legislation facilitating tax co-operation in place.
Mario Tuor, spokesman for the Swiss State Secretariat for International Finance, said Switzerland hoped to have the required legislation in place shortly and to be in a position to be deemed compliant with the international standards next year.