On Thursday 18 October, MEPs reacted with outrage to the revelations of a consortium of 19 media sources concerning a mass-scale tax fraud, allowing European banks to avoid tax on share dividends for more than €55 billion over 15 years, with Europe struggling to bounce back from the financial crisis.
“In 2008, the State saved banks from collapse using European citizens' tax money. Since then, the banks have not only blocked legislative advances aiming to govern their practices […], but some of them have even set about pillaging the states' tax resources”, said Eva Joly (Greens/EFA, France), demanding a “reinforcement of the exchange of information in order to prevent this sort of organised tax fraud”.
On behalf of the S&D group. Jeppe Kofod of Denmark, Peter Simon of Germany and Pervenche Berès of France requested a hearing on the tax scandal to be held before the special 'TAX 3' committee of the EP on financial crime and tax fraud.
“How many more [financial scandals] do we need to see in order to act?" they ask in a press release, denouncing it as “pure and simple welfare theft committed by a corrupt global elite of bankers, lawyers and traders, who illegally helped themselves to billions in European tax money”.
They consider that this latest tax scandal proves the limitations of the current exchange of information regimes, due to a lack of honest and effective cooperation between the national tax administrations. They call for even greater transparency as well as reinforced supervision of the financial markets, for instance through the creation of a “European financial intelligence unit and a European tax policy coherence and coordination centre”.
Reacting to the revelations, the European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Pierre Moscovici, tweeted that “since 2014, the Commission has been acting to roll out the automatic exchange of information between European countries and reinforce transparency”. “In view of ever more complex schemes, the solution is European”, he stressed (our translation).
It is believed that 11 states have forgone more than €55 billion in tax, including €30 million for Germany, €17 billion for France and €4.5 billion for Italy. The other states include Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)