A bill in the Panamanian parliament just passed: tax evasion has been elevated to a criminal offense. With this step, Panama hopes to keep the country off the list of the uncooperative jurisdictions and maintain of the right side of the regulators.
Only two days after that happened, The European Commission listed Panama in the list of the countries deemed to be participating in money laundering.
In its turn, the new law in Panama says tax evasion of $300,000 or above is a crime and will be punished with prison sentence of between two and five years. Besides the imprisonment there will be a fine of between two and ten times of the total amount of money evaded.
The law 70/2019 leaves the Bahamas as the only country in the Caribbean not treating tax evasion as a criminal offence.
Officials claim that the new law will try to eliminate any cases of creating anonymous corporations with the intent of covering money laundering acts.
Panama has been long struggling to be wiped out of the European blacklists, particularly those of EU and OECD, ever since the 2016 Panama Papers scandal when millions of financial documents have become public. The company in the center of the scandal, Mossack Fonseca, was dissolved in April of 2018.
In January of 2018 Panama was removed from the “tax haven list”, by joining the OECD’s automatic exchange of information programme, known formally as Common Reporting Standard.
