Brussels, 11/04/2016 (Agence Europe) - The German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, announced an action plan to step up the fight against tax fraud and tax evasion on Sunday 10 April, a few days after the Panama Papers revelations showed the scale of the phenomenon.
The proposals put forward in this ten-point plan, which was reported by the newspapers Handelsblatt and Die Welt, include the creation of a global blacklist of non-cooperative jurisdictions in taxation matters. Once this list has been drawn up, under the aegis of the OECD, certain financial operations would no longer be permitted with the jurisdictions on the list.
The European Union is currently looking into the idea of a pan-European list, which would serve in addition to the national lists, such as the French list, to which Panama was recently added. The European Commissioner for Taxation, Pierre Moscovici, would like the pan-European list to be set in place within six months on the basis of common criteria and, potentially, to come with sanctions (see EUROPE 11527). The dossier has been included on the agenda of the informal meeting of the European finance ministers, to be held in Amsterdam on Friday 22 April.
Schäuble is also calling for national registers to show clearly who is hiding behind shell companies. These registers would then be connected up at international level. They would be accessible to non-governmental organisations and journalists.
At German level, the action plan will virtually abolish the statute of limitations in cases of tax fraud. It provides for stiffer sanctions for businesses and banks found to be in breach. Credit establishments offering their clients tax optimisation products will also be obliged to report this to the tax administration.
On Thursday 7 April, at a joint council of ministers, France and Germany called on the international community to work on effective counter-measures to oblige non-cooperative jurisdictions to adopt the common rules. “A European list of non-cooperative jurisdictions and territories would be a first step in this direction”, they stress in a press release.
Chain reactions
On Monday 11 April, the British Prime Minister David Cameron, who was personally targeted by the Panama Papers, launched his counter-attack, pledging to bring in criminal sanctions against company directors who fail to prevent their employees from facilitating tax evasion.
Similar to the situation in the UK on Sunday, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Valletta to call for two senior Maltese officials to step down, including the energy minister, Konrad Mizzi, who has set up companies in Panama.
Following the Panama Papers revelations, which covered 210,000 companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions, the JITSIC network of heads of tax administrations will meet in Paris on Wednesday 13 April in order to discuss a coordinated response. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)