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Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Imbert happy as House passes Global Forum bill

by

163 days ago
20240914
Finance Minister  Colm Imbert moves the Second Reading of the Miscellaneous Provisions (Global Forum) Bill, 2024, in Parliament on Friday.

Finance Minister Colm Imbert moves the Second Reading of the Miscellaneous Provisions (Global Forum) Bill, 2024, in Parliament on Friday.

Photo courtesy OFFICE OF THE PARLIAMENT

The House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives has passed a bill de­signed to help T&T get off the Eu­ro­pean Union’s black­list of non-co­op­er­a­tive tax ju­ris­dic­tions - and to al­so be re­moved from the Glob­al Fo­rum’s non-com­pli­ance list.

The 18-Mis­cel­la­neous Pro­vi­sions (Glob­al Fo­rum) Bill was pi­lot­ed by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm on Fri­day. It was the first item of work on which the House em­barked im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter the fifth and fi­nal ses­sion of the 12th Par­lia­ment be­gan.

The bill was passed with amend­ments from the EU. It re­quired on­ly sim­ple ma­jor­i­ty - Gov­ern­ment votes - for pas­sage. The Op­po­si­tion had queried and ob­ject­ed to var­i­ous as­pects.

In pi­lot­ing de­bate, Im­bert said the point of the bill is to re­move T&T from the EU’s list of non-co­op­er­a­tive ju­ris­dic­tions for tax pur­pos­es.

The bill makes amend­ments to 16 laws, rang­ing from cor­rup­tion pre­ven­tion and an­ti-ter­ror­ism law to the Com­pa­nies Act and non-prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion laws.

Pro­vi­sions for com­pa­nies strength­en the rules of iden­ti­fy­ing ben­e­fi­cial own­ers, in­creas­es re­port­ing oblig­a­tions and cer­tain penal­ties and in­tro­duces new sec­tions - in­clud­ing em­pow­er­ing the Reg­is­trar Gen­er­al to in­spect reg­is­ters/books/doc­u­ments of com­pa­nies, trusts and non prof­it en­ti­ties.

The bill em­pow­ers T&T’s reg­u­la­to­ry bod­ies to move ef­fec­tive­ly to ex­change tax in­for­ma­tion with oth­er ju­ris­dic­tions in line with var­i­ous agree­ments. Im­bert said it in­tro­duces strict con­trols to pre­vent mis­use of tax in­for­ma­tion, pro­tect tax­pay­ers’ rights and en­sure in­for­ma­tion ex­change ad­heres to the terms of agree­ments to which T&T is bound.

He said the bill is de­signed to en­sure T&T re­mains at­trac­tive to glob­al in­vestors who are com­pelled to com­ply with in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards of tax trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty.

The bill was de­vel­oped in con­sul­ta­tion and un­der the guid­ance of the Glob­al Fo­rum Sec­re­tari­at, which vis­it­ed T&T in March to do a mock peer re­view on trans­paren­cy and tax in­for­ma­tion ex­change.

Im­bert said ad­di­tion­al amend­ments on cer­tain claus­es - which he re­ceived Thurs­day night - were pro­vid­ed by the Eu­ro­pean Union An­ti-Mon­ey Laun­der­ing and Counter-Ter­ror­ism Fi­nanc­ing (AMLCTF) Glob­al Fa­cil­i­ty. That fa­cil­i­ty is cur­rent­ly in T&T on a mis­sion fo­cused on ben­e­fi­cial own­er­ship and has been en­gag­ing with state agen­cies. Their ex­perts pro­vid­ed valu­able guid­ance on the bill’s pro­vi­sions, he added.

Im­bert said the amend­ments were crit­i­cal as, “if we don’t ac­cept the rec­om­men­da­tions of the Glob­al Fo­rum/EU team, we may run the risk of not be­ing suc­cess­ful in the peer re­view process in which we’re cur­rent­ly en­gaged to get off the EU black­list and the G non-com­pli­ance list.”

“The bill re­flects T&T’s com­mit­ment to glob­al stan­dards of tax trans­paren­cy. We’ve been giv­en a se­ries of dead­lines to achieve our ob­jec­tive of com­ing off of the grey list/black list/com­pli­ance list - what­ev­er you want to call them - by year-end.”

Im­bert said he wrote the chair­man of the Code of Con­duct Group in the Eu­ro­pean Coun­cil in Ju­ly out­lin­ing the ex­ten­sive ef­forts T&T’s un­der­tak­en and reaf­firm­ing the com­mit­ment to meet­ing the nec­es­sary re­quire­ments for T&T’s re­moval from the list of non-co-op­er­a­tive tax ju­ris­dic­tions.

Im­bert said he was sat­is­fied Gov­ern­ment achieved a ro­bust flex­i­ble strat­e­gy to deal with T&T’s re­moval from the EU’s black­list and that T&T has a strong work­ing re­la­tion­ship with the Glob­al Fo­rum and OECD.

Say­ing the bill was ab­solute­ly es­sen­tial, Im­bert urged MPs to work to­wards re­mov­ing T&T from the grey and black lists so it could be­come a des­ti­na­tion “that wouldn’t have that stig­ma” and for­eign in­vest­ment wouldn’t be af­fect­ed.

The House lat­er ad­journed to a date to be fixed.


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