Brussels, 23/05/2013 (Agence Europe) - Delight for some, shrugged shoulders and talk of “gestures” from others. Reaction pours in to the Wednesday 22 May special European summit on tackling tax fraud and tax evasion.
In a press release published after the summit, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, expressed delight that the summit's conclusions document had referred to automatic exchange of bank account information (see EUROPE 10850), although he would have preferred something “more precise”. He was happy about the negotiating mandate for the Commission for negotiating changes to the EU's tax agreement with five European tax havens, the leaders' commitment to adopt the updated savings tax directive by the end of the year, enlarging its scope.
Italy's prime minister, Enrico Letta, went back on what he had said before the summit, when he had criticised the “incredible level of hypocrisy at European level” about tax evasion. At a press conference after the summit, he talked instead of a “strong impulse” from Europe about automatic exchange of information ahead of the G8 meeting in Northern Ireland, to be chaired by the United Kingdom, on 17 and 18 June, along with “very considered and serious words” about savings tax from the leaders of Luxembourg and Austria.
At the European Parliament (EP), the EPP put the pressure on, with EPP chief Joseph Daul urging member states to demonstrate ambition, achieve results and implement as soon as possible the decisions taken by the European summit on tackling tax evasion and tax havens. The head of the S&D Group at the EP, Hannes Swoboda, was more critical, being happy with the progress made on automatic exchange of bank information, the savings tax directive and the rapid reaction mechanism for tackling VAT fraud, but unhappy, “yet again”, at the leaders' failure to take action in other areas. He says they didn't even mention in the conclusions document the need for a clear definition of what constitutes a tax haven and an EU blacklist of tax havens, or the need to halve lost tax revenue and tax fraud by 2020, as recommended by the EP. Greens Group joint leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit and MEP Philippe Lamberts criticised what they called a public relations exercise without any tangible progress, postponing until December 2013 the signing of an EU deal on the automatic exchange of information on interest on savings, a question that has been dragging on for five years now, and the fact that the idea of harmonising company tax, or at least the basis on which company tax is charged, has disappeared from the radar, while the extension to all companies (rather than simply big companies) of the requirement to give country-by-country breakdowns in their balance sheets is not even mentioned in the conclusions document. (FG/transl.fl)