Countless deadlines for the financial transaction tax (FTT) have come and gone. Despite the promises made last June, no deadline has been set for the month of September.
Before the summer, the ten participating states decided to set up two working groups to examine two particularly thorny aspects of the negotiations by September: one group, led by Italy, would look into the impact of taxing derivative products on sovereign financing; the other, headed up by Germany, would look at the costs of implementing a tax compared to the anticipated revenue.
At the informal meeting of the European finance ministers held in Bratislava over the weekend of 10-12 September, the matter was discussed only between the 28 member states, during the discussions on 'tax certainty'. "Will it work out one day?", the German minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, asked at the meeting behind closed doors, according to one source close to the dossier. Schäuble has never made any secret of the fact that he feels that the difficulty in the discussions was exacerbated by the fact that only 11 countries (now 10) opted to join in the enhanced cooperation to set the tax in place. "I would like to ask all of you to join us and very soon, we will have far greater success" was the appeal he made to his peers in December 2015 (see EUROPE 11448). Perhaps the solution will only be possible at international level, he also suggested over the weekend. He plans to use the forthcoming German Presidency of the G20 to put the idea on the table. Belgium said that it supported this approach.
Even so, this does not mean that discussions will not continue between ten. "I hope nobody will pull the plug (Ed: on the enhanced cooperation) and there will be some light (…). There was a global basis for an agreement, it is up to the member states to lift their last reservations (…). I hope that we will be capable of making this progress by the end of the year", the European commissioner for taxation, Pierre Moscovici, said on Saturday. (Original version in French by Élodie Lamer)