TOKYO: Panama will adopt international tax reporting standards and participate in the automatic exchange of tax information by 2018, President Juan Carlos Varela told Japanese media on Tuesday.

“To prevent the illegal use of Panama’s financial systems, we would like to cooperate with other countries to improve transparency,” Valera told broadcaster NHK during a visit to Tokyo.

Members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which helped establish the information-exchange scheme, would visit Panama as early as this week to negotiate specific methods for sharing information, he told the Nikkei newspaper.

The agreement on automatically swapping tax information, which around 100 countries have now joined, is due to come into effect in 2017.

Valera’s comment comes after OECD chief Jose Angel Gurria said on Thursday that Panama had decided to adopt international tax reporting standards.

Panama would also set up a committee of six to eight domestic and foreign experts within six months to make the Panamanian financial system more transparent, Valera told several Japanese media organisations.

Published in Dawn, April 20th, 2016