Panton signs latest global information exchange deal
(CNSBusiness): The Cayman Islands government joined more than 50 countries Wednesday, when it signed the latest agreement to tackle global tax evasion. Wayne Panton, the financial services minister, signed on the dotted line of the OECD’s Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA) in Berlin, the latest worldwide standard for automatic exchange of information (AEOI) among tax authorities. “For Cayman to sign the MCAA is a logical progression in our longstanding international cooperation efforts, and we are pleased that so many countries and jurisdictions are now part of this worldwide effort to fight tax evasion via a global standard, across borders,” Panton said.
More than 90 countries now have committed to implementing the new global standard of AEOI. Panton said the US has also has indicated that it will undertake AEOI pursuant to FATCA from 2015, and that it has entered into intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) with jurisdictions, including Cayman, to do so.
“Although Cayman is one of the more than 50 early adopters that have committed to begin AEOI exchanges in 2017, our history of cooperation reaches back to 2005, when we began participating in EUSD,” he said. “Furthermore in April 2013, based on our understanding of the direction of global efforts we informed the UK that we would join what was known then as the G5 pilot – an initiative announced by the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, regarding the multilateral automatic exchange of tax information.”
The deal is being held up as an end to banking secrecy which will aid the worldwide fight against tax fraud and evasion.
“Banking secrecy, in its old form, is obsolete,” the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, told the German press ahead of the Wednesday meeting. Banking secrecy, he added, is “no longer appropriate at a time when people can transfer their money all over the world at the press of a button via the Internet.”
Schaeuble hosted the two-day meeting of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes in the German capital. Accompanying Panton to the meeting were the ministry’s chief officer Dax Basdeo, and director of the Department for International Tax Cooperation, Duncan Nicol. The signing was held after the Global Forum.
