Brussels, 09/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Monday 9 February, the European Commission stressed that actions had been launched at EU and global level to tackle the problem of tax evasion, which is once again in the headlines following the SwissLeaks revelations, which show how the Swiss subsidiary of HSBC helped its clients from all over the world to hide the equivalent of $102 billion from the taxman.
Speaking through its spokesperson Vanessa Mock, the Commission explained that several of the 30 measures announced in 2012, and which have since been approved, “aim to increase transparency in the exchange of information between the tax administrations”. An agreement negotiated with Switzerland in 2004 is also currently being revised, to bring it up to date with the global OECD standard on the automatic exchange of information, which Switzerland has undertaken to implement in 2018. A Commission source acknowledged that tax evasion, as reported in SwissLeaks, is still possible, an issue that will be resolved by the entry into force of the OECD standard.
“This is an excellent illustration of what went on in an opaque world in which information was not exchanged”, Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, told AFP. “This will no longer be possible. What happened was between the years 2005-2008; this was really before the breakthroughs in the fight against banking secrecy”, he added.
For its part, Belgium has announced that it plans to put out arrest warrants against former and current leaders of the bank.
LuxLeaks. This Thursday, the European Parliament is to hold a vote on a special committee in the wake of LuxLeaks, a massive wave of leaks which shed light on aggressive tax planning by multinationals by dint of tax rulings. Before it does so, the conference of the presidents is still to discuss the mandate. The Commission is taking the dossier very seriously and will hold an initial guideline debate at the College on 18 February, on a first package of measures to tackle tax evasion and tax optimisation. (Elodie Lamer)