Talks to include country-by-country reporting for big companies in EU legislation to require them to reveal their turnover, taxes and staff numbers are struggling.
As part of the review of the EU directive on shareholder rights, the European Parliament included in its negotiating position public country-by-country reporting measures (see EUROPE 11571), which were left to one side in initial talks with the Council in order to make progress on the rest of the text. At the last plenary session in Strasbourg, the rapporteur on this issue, Sergio Cofferati (S&D, Italy), suggested simply dropping the reporting measures if the talks on the other aspects of the directive are satisfactory as far as the MEPs are concerned.
The Parliament is therefore calling in exchange for greater transparency from intuitional investors, stronger measures on identifying shareholders and staff votes on director pay.
At the Parliament, the idea of abandoning reporting is justified by the fact that there is no agreement among the political groups about the amendments on the subject, some of them even contradicting the rapporteur in mid-interinstitutional talks.
A source says that at a working meeting at the Council on Thursday 14 October, national experts welcomed the fact that most MEPs agree to drop the fiscal transparency measures.
Accounting directive. The planned changes to the accounting directive to introduce country-by-country reporting are on hold (see EUROPE 11578).
At the Council, the delegations are waiting for an opinion from the legal department about the text’s legal basis. Several member states say that this is a tax question and should therefore be decided unanimously with the European Parliament simply being consulted. The legal opinion is expected to be ready for the meeting of Council experts on 24 October.
EUROPE understands that the countries in favour of the text are France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands and Greece. The opposing countries are said to be Luxembourg, Germany, Cyprus, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Hungary, Estonia and Ireland.
At the Parliament, disagreements between the legal affairs and the economic affairs committees about which committee should have control of this issue have led to slight delays in the legislative process. (Original version in French by Elodie Lamer)