On Thursday 4 May, the European Commissioner for Taxation, Pierre Moscovici of France, gave the MEPs of the committee of investigation into the Panama Papers scandal the first elements of his proposal to regulate the activities of financial advisers, to be presented this side of the summer.
He referred to a new directive, confirming that the Commission will indeed opt for binding legislation rather than just a recommendation. “There is a lot at stake (…). We need a proper system to provide disincentives and transparency”, he explained, in answer to a question from a member of the GUE/NGL group.
Moscovici outlined three major principles: the text will cover all tax intermediaries, all schemes and all jurisdictions. His words seemed to indicate that the Commission will choose to require these intermediaries to submit all aggressive tax planning schemes to the tax authorities. The Commission may therefore make further changes to the directive on administrative cooperation. On intermediaries, Moscovici spoke of banks, tax advisers and law firms.
As regards the schemes in question, he explained that there would be no exhaustive list of the schemes covered, just a “bundle of criteria”.
Lastly, as regards geographical coverage, he went some way towards refuting the conclusions of the study presented to the MEPs two days earlier. These conclusions basically stated that it would be difficult to regulate tax intermediaries, as most of them are based outside the EU (see EUROPE 11780). All jurisdictions will be covered, the Commissioner stressed, because if an intermediary does not fulfil this obligation, the taxpayer in the EU will itself be required to submit the scheme in question to the tax authorities. It is also worth noting that according to Portuguese MEP Ana Gomes (S&D), the coordinators of the committee of investigation had decided to invite the Maltese Prime Minister to attend a session (see EUROPE 11779). (Original version in French by Élodie Lamer)