Brussels, 15/05/2013 (Agence Europe) - Following a meeting with French president, François Hollande (see other article) on Wednesday 15 May, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, declared that, “next week's European Council will enable us to tackle two important levers for our economies”.
The first lever will involve the fight against tax evasion and fraud which accounts for millions of lost euros to the respective national treasuries. Barroso said that “the European Commission expects heads of state and government to politically decide to move forward on very concrete subjects such as the end to banking secrecy and relations with third countries”. He highlighted some of the progress that had been made during the ECOFIN Council on Tuesday 14 May but said that the truth was that they “needed a new boost at a level of the European Council” (see other article and EUROPE 10845).
According to the draft conclusions on Monday 13 May (ref: Twitter @AgencEurope), the European Council will call on the EU to play a “leading role” to ensure that automatic tax information exchange becomes, “the new international standard”. To this end, work must be speeded up in the EU so that this kind of exchange covers “a comprehensive series of revenues” on the basis of a future legislative proposal. It should be noted that the reference made is to another initiative, expected before the end of this year, which will revise the “parent company/subsidiary” directive in an effort to tackle aggressive tax planning. A rethink is also expected with regard to the code of conduct, which should be enhanced for minimising unfair competition in the corporate tax field.
Barroso declared that given the effect of their energy dependency and costs on their savings it was high time that they moved forwards to a genuine European energy policy. The European Council draft conclusions mentions four areas of action: - completion of the internal energy market by 2014 and the development of interconnections in an effort to break the isolation of certain countries by 2015; - expanding investment in energy infrastructure; - stepping up and diversifying supply; - and action that had an impact on prices (our translation throughout). (MB/transl.fl)