On Monday 22 May, Malta found itself in the hotseat once again, following the publication over the weekend of revelations about its advantageous tax system, which is alleged to frequently turn a blind eye to money laundering.
Early evening on Friday 19 May, European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) started the ball rolling for the series of revelations over several days concerning Malta's tax system, which is extremely generous to businesses, its VAT system and lax rules on betting and gambling. EIC estimates that Malta costs the other member states the tidy sum of €2 billion in tax revenue a year, according to the website, Mediapart.
“They tried to say that there is something illegal in our financial services, when the truth is that our financial systems are the same as when we joined the European Union”, the Maltese Prime Minister, Joseph Muscat, said over the weekend. The finance minister, Edward Scicluna, described the revelations as “fake news” relayed by other European countries that “want to taste our success, particularly in the iGaming sector”.
At the end of April, the German Land of North Rhine-Westphalia was anonymously sent a CD of data comprising a list of 77,000 companies registered in Malta. “There have long been indications of a sort of Panama in Europe”, Norbert Walter-Borjans, finance minister of the Land, said in Berlin this week. The Maltese Prime Minister called snap elections against the backdrop of accusations that his wife and certain members of his team were involved in the Panama Papers scandal.
On Monday, French and German finance ministers announced the creation of a working group on Eurozone integration, for instance through fiscal harmonisation, starting with corporate taxation. The European ministers will hold an exchange of views on this dossier this Tuesday 23 May. (Original version in French by Élodie Lamer)