On Thursday 18 January, the Commissioner for Taxation, Pierre Moscovici, told a small group of journalists that he feels that there were no tax havens in the EU, but that there are European states which are fiscal black holes. Some of them are too favourable to aggressive tax planning.
He believes there is a need for an economic approach, taking out tax governance standards to reflect on places where aggressive tax planning is to be found. If flows go more into a particular jurisdiction, this is frequently because they are attracted there by certain regimes.
He was speaking ahead of a meeting of finance ministers on Tuesday 23 January that is set to approve without discussion the decision to take eight countries off the blacklist of tax havens, including Panama (see EUROPE 11935). “I will be vigilant to the diplomatic temptation to introduce any non-objective parameters in assessing the countries' tax situation”, he said, adding that he was shocked that the list had shrunk in just one month.
According to our information, there were discussions between member states on the level of commitment to ask of third countries to take them off the blacklist. It was finally agreed that the level of commitment requested of these countries in November last year was sufficient (in other words, basically a strong political declaration in favour of reforms at an appropriate level of power).
“This list has the merit of existing. The process of drafting it was a serious one. However, it is not without its weaknesses, for instance the inter-governmental and therefore a little diplomatic nature of this list. Any reduction of the list will be seen as fading it out”, he said.
To make the list more credible, he called upon the member states to publish the letters of commitments made by the countries on the grey list, in other words those that do not make the blacklist but require monitoring. Countries recently hit by hurricanes have until 14 February to submit their commitments.
A discussion on possible sanctions will take place at the Council's corporate taxation 'code of conduct' group, to prepare for the ministers' meeting in March. (Original version in French by Élodie Lamer)