The United National Congress (UNC) is questioning how the attorney general of Barbados was able to get his country off the European Union (EU) blacklist while, under Faris Al-Rawi, TT remains on it?
Via a statement to media, he said “In the wake of Barbados vaccinating over 12% of its population for Covid, compared to TT’s embarrassing 0.08 %; that country has once again demonstrated its regional leadership by last week being removed from the EU blacklist while TT continues to languish on it. This can affect our ability to trade with this powerful economic bloc.”
He said the EU announced that it had removed Barbados from the list of jurisdictions that were non-cooperative in matters of taxation. It also announced that TT remained blacklisted.
Charles is asking AG Faris Al Rawi, why his Barbadian counterpart, Dale Dermot Marshall Q.C., was able to get his country off the EU blacklist while he was unable so to do?
This after the UNC supported every piece of legislation that came before Parliament that we were told would get us off the various blacklists.
These included:
– The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA)
– The Income Tax (Amendment) Bill, 2019
– The Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters Bill, 2018, and
– The Tax Information Exchange Agreements Bill, 2018
“We were informed ominously that if we did not support these Bills, there would be dire consequences for our economy.
We did, and were therefore most surprised to learn last week that TT remains blacklisted. We asked the Government to bring all the legislation to Parliament in one package so that the issue of blacklisting would be dealt with once and for all. This was apparently not done.”
“Once again the AG appeared to have come to Parliament with half baked, cut and paste, piecemeal, “plaster on a sore” legislation that were fundamentally inadequate to the challenges we face with blacklisting.”
Charles said “Faris must tell us if this is true or not.
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