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| - Turkey has been spared landing on the EU's tax blacklist, diplomatic sources said Thursday, despite failing to fulfil commitments, with Brussels under pressure to avoid stoking tensions with Ankara. The 27 EU member states will however add the Cayman Islands, sources said, the first British overseas territory to join the blacklist since Brexit. Panama will meanwhile return to the blacklist of tax havens, with the Seychelles and Palau also being added. The list will be confirmed by the EU finance ministers at their meeting in Brussels next Tuesday. Despite Turkey falling short of commitments, an EU source said the country had "escaped the blacklist". Turkey was on the hook to install an automatic exchange of tax information in with EU states in 2019, but "is being given a little more time for political reasons", the source added, without elaborating. The EU depends on Turkey to limit migration from war-torn Syria, but relations have been strained since political purges led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after an attempted coup in 2016. The list was first drawn up in 2017 in the wake of several scandals, including the Panama Papers and LuxLeaks, that pushed Brussels into doing more to fight tax evasion by multinationals and the rich. EU member countries cannot be on the list and blacklisted countries face only limited sanctions, consisting of freezing them out of European aid or development funding. The EU blacklist currently includes eight countries or jurisdictions: American Samoa, Fiji, Guam, Oman, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, the US Virgin Islands and Vanuatu. clp/arp/dc/jj
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