The 14 overseas territories spelt out a number of moves they had taken to make their jurisdictions more transparent in a communiqué following the Joint Ministerial Council meeting, hosted by Mark Simmonds, the Foreign Office minister for the overseas territories.
This comes after one of the territories, the British Virgin Islands, was recently deemed to be ‘non compliant’ in a review of 50 countries by the OECD for its Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes.
The communiqué stated that each of the overseas territories had “agreed to play an active part in the pilot initiative on automatic tax information exchange launched by the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.”
It also said that an action plan had been published setting out the steps that they will take to ensure the collection and availability of complete company ownership information.
One of the priorities going forward would be “to challenge other jurisdictions to match our commitments to transparency and tax information exchange.”
Earlier this week, Bermuda, the UK overseas territory known for its specialist expertise in insurance, signed a “Model 2 UK FATCA” intergovernmental agreement with the UK.
The fourteen UK overseas territories are:
- Anguilla
- Bermuda
- the British Antarctic Territory
- the British Indian Ocean Territory
- the British Virgin Islands
- the Cayman Islands
- the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia on Cyprus
- the Falkland Islands
- Gibraltar
- Montserrat
- the Pitcairn Islands
- Saint Helena and its dependencies (Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha)
- South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
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the Turks and Caicos Islands
