Brussels, 19/04/2016 (Agence Europe) - MEPs from the GUE/NGL, Fabio de Masi, and the Greens/EFA, Sven Giegold (both from Germany), are losing patience with what they describe as a Commission refusal to send the TAXE II Committee documents from the "Code of Conduct" group at the Council on corporation Taxes.
This situation was outlined a few weeks ago by the Director-General at the Commission, Stephen Quest. He said that he was confident that the special committee would admit that the Commission had appropriately responded to the request by MEPs to send them all the pertinent documents.
A list of documents effectively sent or made available to MEPs, compiled by De Masi and Giegold and sent to EUROPE, demonstrates, however, that certain pieces are still missing from the request. Between 2002 and 2004 and since the middle of 2015, no minutes have been made available to MEPs. Between 2007 and 2008, only two instances of minutes were sent. After 2005, significant gaps were observed with regard to these documents and which, according to the MEPs, are proof that the Commissioned still has them.
Sven Giegold said that "While publicly calling for more tax transparency, the European Commission itself is at the forefront of mystery-mongers when it comes to disclosing documents of the Code of Conduct Group on business taxation". The Greens MEP is particularly critical of the fact that a list of national fiscal measures examined by the "Code of Conduct" Group remains confidential.
Fabio De Masi explained "While maintaining political pressure, we are also pursuing legal steps to shed light for the wider public on this ineffective debating club that is the Code of Conduct Group. We are confident that the Commission's overly secretive approach will not be upheld in front of the Court of the European Union."
The President of the TAXE II Committee, Alain Lamassoure (EPP, France), told the coordinators from TAXE II about his discussion with Stephen Quest on Monday evening. He said that that they had been informed about the "permanent negotiations with the Commission" to obtain access to the documents and were "completely satisfied" with what he had obtained from the Commission the minutes. With regard to the documents from the Code of Conduct group, which had been produced at the request of around 10 member states, he explained that 80% of states now agreed that these documents were made available to MEPs. With regard to the European Commission, confidence now does exist about the possibility of providing some clarification about the divergences with the two or three of the last member states with misgivings.
With regard to requests from the two MEPs to have access to other documents from the Council working groups, it had been explained to the Commission that clarification had been requested about the documents requested by the MEPs but these requests for clarification went unanswered until 13 April.
Alain Lamassoure also explained to us that he hoped that the, "documents already available and the facilities obtained" would be "better used than they have been up until now" by MEPs. Huge crowds entering the reading rooms made available to the MEPs are not expected. (Original version in French by Elodie Lamer)