Ministers and senior officials from Kazakhstan, Peru, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine and Estonia recently signed the BEPS Multilateral Convention bringing the total number of jurisdictions in the Convention to 83. This Convention updates the existing network of bilateral tax treaties which aims to reduce opportunities for tax avoidance by multinational enterprises.

The Convention entered force on 1 July 2018 for five of the jurisdictions (Austria, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Poland and Slovenia) that signed last year. The Convention is the first multilateral treaty of its kind, allowing jurisdictions to integrate results from the OECD/G20 BEPS Project into their existing networks of bilateral tax treaties. The OECD/G20 BEPS Project aims to close the gaps in existing international rules that allow corporate profits to be artificially shifted to low or no tax environments, where companies have little or no economic activity according to the OECD.