With the Isle of Man sharing banking details with Portugal since January this year, the tax department has been discovering just how much Portuguese money sits in this self-governing British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea.
According to negociosonline, Mann’s banks hold around 1,172 accounts with “residents in Portugal” – involving “roughly €4 billion”.
Conversely, eight accounts held in Portugal by Mann residents total €4 million – and that, says the paper, has seen the finance ministry justifying the decision to remove the tiny island from its taxation blacklist, along with Uruguay and Jersey.
But that all changed last Friday when a CDS-PP proposal to return the three territories to Portugal’s tax haven blacklist won the day – thanks largely to block abstention by the Bloco de Esquerda.
Today(Monday), the PS has called the proposal back in for a second vote, though negocios suggests the result “could be the same”.
For now, little has been said about what the tax department may have found via accounts held in Jersey – how much they run to, or how many Portuguese-based clients they refer to, while communication with Uruguay was not due to start until 2018.
The principal behind the sharing banking details is to promote the communication of situations of fraud and/ or tax evasion.
The PS government says it is convinced that the move to open channels with the Isle of Man et al has been a good one, as in the past financial information was much more “opaque and difficult to obtain”.
