The UAE and Bahrain expect to be removed from the European Union’s tax-haven blacklist after taking steps to block tax avoidance by companies, the governments of the two countries said on Thursday. Two days ago, EU finance ministers included the UAE and Bahrain on a new blacklist of 17 jurisdictions deemed to be tax havens. Countries on the blacklist may no longer be used by EU institutions for international financial operations, and transactions involving them could be subject to closer scrutiny. On Thursday, both the UAE and Bahrain said they did not deserve to be on the list because they had already taken many steps to exchange financial information with other countries. But they pledged to do more to satisfy the EU. The UAE said that the only outstanding issue with the EU was implementing the BEPS Minimum Standard. BEPS is a set of policies to tackle tax avoidance strategies that allow multinational companies to shift profits artificially to low or no-tax locations. The UAE has committed to finalizing implementation of BEPS by October 2018 and ratifying it by March 2019, a schedule which would give the country’s federal structure enough time to ratify the measure across all seven emirates, the government said.