The EU faces large amounts of financial secrecy supplied to it by secrecy jurisdictions. In this chapter, we use the Bilateral Financial Secrecy Index to quantify which jurisdictions supply most secrecy to EU Member States. The chapter assesses the progress of two recent EU policy efforts to tackle financial secrecy: automatic exchange of country-by-country reporting (CbCR) data and black and grey list of non-cooperative jurisdictions. It is found that 34 per cent of the financial secrecy faced by the EU is supplied by other Member States, whose a priori exclusion from the blacklisting exercise reveals its fundamental flaw. Further 13 per cent is supplied by the EU’s dependencies, mainly the UK’s Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and Guernsey. The jurisdictions that supply the most secrecy not covered by automatic information exchange of CbCR data are the British Virgin Islands, United States, and Curacao. Finally the chapter discusses policy recommendations that stem from our analysis.

This study has been prepared within the UNU-WIDER project Detecting and countering illicit financial flows that is implemented in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen. The project is part of the Domestic Revenue Mobilization programme, which is financed through specific contributions by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).

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