FT.com / Reports - Tax: New agreements make evasion much tougher: "Gibraltar laid out its latest changes to tax legislation, it trumpeted the completion of its “14-year transition from tax haven to mainstream European financial services centre”.
Recent milestones have included a string of tax information exchange agreements (TIEAs) that will help other countries track down tax evaders and the plan to abolish its tax-exempt company regime targeted at companies that did no local business and were not owned by Gibraltarians. Its abolition next January, which will coincide with a reduction of corporation tax from 22 per cent to 10 per cent, sets Gibraltar apart from other British overseas territories which charge a zero rate of corporation tax. A Treasury report on offshore centres last year said this gave Gibraltar “a fiscal policy closest to the growing international consensus on tax norms”.
Yet shedding the tax haven tag is an ambitious goal for any small financial centre, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis. And Gibraltar still has critics. Last year, Tax Justice Network, an anti-tax haven campaign group criticised Gibraltar as opaque on more than nine out of ten criteria.
Gibraltar is exposed to a number of money laundering and terrorist financing risks, according to a 2007 International Monetary Fund report. Gibraltar is near drug smuggling and human smuggling routes and is a banking centre for northern European expatriates with property in south Spain."
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