Minister of Economic Affairs, Sen. Hon. Michael Halkitis appeared at a press briefing at the office of the Prime Minister on Thursday where he addressed the country’s blacklisting by the European Union (EU).
Halkitis told reporters, “that forum on harmful tax practices has a meeting next week which we will be attending, myself along with a team from the legal unit of the Ministry of Finance and at the point we will be able to give a report to that forum on the things that we have done and we are cautiously optimistic that steps will then be taken for them to deem us compliant. And following that when the EU has their next meeting we’re looking forward to be able to have a favourable outcome from them.”
According to Halkitis regional countries are considering the view that compliance should be assessed by the United Nations. “We do not think that jurisdictions who are in competition with us and other jurisdictions, in terms of financial services, should be the judge and the jury of who’s being compliant in terms of their tax standards. As a matter of fact there’s an initiative, there should have been a meeting on this coming Monday in Barbados to discuss that very issue, Unfortunately that meeting has been postponed. But there is momentum building in the region, in what we call the global south, in Africa and the east, that we need to change this calculation who determines who is compliant from non-compliant.”
