The Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs gave an update on the blacklisting of The Bahamas by the European Union.

Senator Ryan Pinder told reporters outside of Cabinet on Tuesday.  “Being on the EU non cooperative list has to do with the economic substance regime of The Bahamas.  And there were really three aspects on why we were on the non cooperative list. The first one would be the legislation and updating the legislation to make sure we’re compliant with international best practices.  The second component was the reporting portal was in effective that was in place.  And the third component was we needed to show that we were actually enforcing the laws doing on site inspections, seeing if everybody was complying who should be complying.”

Pinder revealed that BDO Chartered Accountants was engaged by the government to construction an purpose built economic substance portal.  The Attorney General said a training session for industry was in the works for this week.  And that the portal should be fully launched in September.

Pinder said on the enforcement side, “the Ministry of Finance who is the competent authority have been doing onsite inspections.  They’ve done in excess of thirty onsite inspections to evaluate compliance with  reporting.  They found a few that were non compliant they’ve actually issued fines and asked for remediation on those aspects.  Those onsite inspections are underway and they have about thirty five more slated to start in September. So we’re meeting all the expectations that were laid out for us.”

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