JUNE 26: The OECD on Monday published a list of 35 tax havens from Europe to the Caribbean and the South Pacific, warning of sanctions a year from now if they failed to change their ways.The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development fingered a string of exotic Pacific and Caribbean offshore centres as potential paradises for tax dodgers, along with the tiny European principalities of Monaco and Liechtenstein.The full OECD tax haven list includes: Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Cook Islands, Dominica, Gibaraltar, Grenada, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, Liberia, Liechtenstein, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, Monaco, Montserrat, Nauru, the Netherlands Antilles, Nieui, Panama, Samoa, Seychelles, St Lucia, St Christopher and Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Tonga, Turks and Caicos, the US Virgin Islands and Vanuatu.Many of those on the list, such as Liechtenstein, had already been singled out in a report last week which cited governments regarded as "non-cooperative" in the fight against money laundering. The French-linked principality of Monaco, the British-tied islands of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man and the British rock colony of Gibaraltar, among others, escaped the money laundering blacklist published by the so-called Financial Action Task Force, but are included among tax havens.After four years of work which focused more on legislation and reported practices than on-the-spot checks, the OECD took the diplomatically sensitive step of issuing a warning list and giving those identified a year to change their ways. "They are being given the opportunity over the next 12 months to determine whether or not they wish to work with the OECD to eliminate harmful features of their regime," the OECD said in a statement.Thereafter, "defensive measures" could be taken against places which refused to conform with international tax standards, it added. The OECD classifies tax havens as those with nominal or no taxes and which either openly or implicitly sell themselves as a place where foreigners can avoid any awkward questions or risk of information on their investments being disclosed.Several places recently got off the hook and were dropped from the OECD's initial shortlist of 47 locations being reviewed on tax practices. Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Malta, Mauritius and San Marino were let off after pledging to meet international norms by 2005.Liechtenstein has been hammered by inclusion in both lists in the wake of a series of high-profile police raids on two banks as part of a money laundering probe. Monaco escaped inclusion in the money laundering list from the FATF, a group set up in 1989 by the Group of Seven economic powers, but one of the more striking feature of the new OECD tax haven list as the large number of islands with links to Britain.
