An unsigned document circulating in the Permanent Representations of the Member States and in the European Parliament is likely to cause a stir on the eve of the second meeting of interinstitutional negotiations on Friday 23 April (see EUROPE 12698/31). Everyone is trying to draw their red lines.
The document in question, a copy of which EUROPE obtained on Thursday 22 April, was attributed to France, according to several commentators, and supported by other countries, according to the newspaper Le Monde. It calls for the strict maintenance of the EU Council’s mandate on the three main stumbling blocks with the European Parliament, thus excluding any room for negotiation.
According to the note, the safeguard clause requested by the EU Council, which provides for a six-year freeze period, must be maintained in the final text. Requiring multinationals to disclose data, which could be used to reconstruct commercial margins, business strategy or pricing policy, would give a competitive edge to competitors and to commercial counterparts seeking commercial advantage, it says.
Furthermore, the paper calls for maintaining the aggregation of data for non-Member States, with the exception of non-cooperative jurisdictions, on the grounds, inter alia, that disaggregating data for non-EU countries would not be in line with the OECD ‘BEPS’ agreements on the confidentiality of data exchanged between tax authorities.
Finally, the note asks to limit the data to be disclosed “to what is strictly necessary”, and thus not to go beyond the list set by the EU Council. The European Parliament wants to add several pieces of information, such as the number of full-time employees, fixed assets, declared capital, preferential tax treatment or public subsidies.
The situation is delicate for the Portuguese Presidency of the EU Council, as its mandate was adopted by a narrow qualified majority of Member States (see EUROPE 12666/8).
Especially when, in particular, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Sweden, Luxembourg and Malta continue to claim that the proposal should have been negotiated as a tax text, by unanimity in the Ecofin Council and without the intervention of the European Parliament (see EUROPE 11758/9).
MEPs seem determined to fight back. At the end of March, the French delegation of the Greens/EFA group in the Parliament had written to the French Finance Minister, Bruno Le Maire, to ask France to defend an “ambitious position” in the upcoming negotiating framework and, in particular, to review its position on the safeguard clause (see EUROPE 12685/26).
Regarding this issue, the European Parliament can count on the support of civil society. Last week, eighty civil society organisations had written to the European Parliament negotiating team asking them to strongly defend their position to the EU Council, in particular on the geographical scope of reporting and the disaggregation of information (see EUROPE 12700/29).
See the note: https://bit.ly/3gwzux9 (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)