Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-23-Speech-4-507"
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"Mr President, I would like to begin by thanking the shadow rapporteurs who have contributed to the adoption of this report in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, not least Mrs Pietikäinen and Mrs Raeva, and to congratulate the coordinators from the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats and the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, Mr Gauzès and Mr Klinz, who played an important role in terms of ensuring that this report, which will be put to the vote tomorrow in our plenary session, was adopted in the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.
You know that at the conclusion of the G20 meeting, some of the EU Heads of State – and prominent ones at that – claimed victory by announcing, in a stream of communications, that the age of banking secrecy was over.
These thunderous statements aside, the European Parliament – and I welcome this – has now set out to do the practical work and has taken an interest not in communication but in the efforts it can make to effectively combat tax evasion, which is estimated to amount to EUR 200 billion each year. These EUR 200 billion should be compared with the amounts for the recovery plans to help the countries of Europe cope with the crisis; they should be compared with the European Union budget; and they should also be compared with the deficit levels of the countries of Europe. Today, Europe’s taxpayers are thus perfectly justified in asking the European banking sector, and therefore the European banks, to make the efforts needed to allow the Member States’ tax authorities to recover part of the tax income they are losing through evasion or fraud.
We have done a constructive job, and I believe that we avoided resorting to dictates or mutual recrimination. We have advanced on three fronts, and I wish to commend what was the draft text from the European Commission and the work done around Commissioner Kovács, who was unquestionably going in the right direction. We have tried, as best we could, taking as our yardstick what the European taxpayers are telling us, to improve the Commission’s text in three directions.
We decided that, as regards the scope of the directive, the text was a little too timid, both on the legal structures involved and in the definition of savings products. We know that financial engineering has a considerable imagination when it comes to inventing new financial products to allow some people to escape taxation. This is why Parliament and the Commission propose to introduce a committee procedure that adapts the definition of savings products to the current reality of that financial engineering.
However, on this issue, many products are currently excluded from the scope, and, in our opinion, they should be included as quickly as possible; this is particularly the case for some types of pension schemes that work via capitalisation, and, more generally, we think that the proposal to include products which guarantee 95% of the investment does not offer sufficient guarantees.
That is why we think the threshold of 90% is more reasonable. Amendments will be tabled to this end tomorrow in plenary. We will see if they are adopted. I regret that we have not found a compromise in committee on this point and hope that plenary gives a strong signal by defining savings products as products which guarantee 90% of the capital and not just 95% products, as the Commission is proposing.
Broad consensus was, however, reached on how the scope of the directive should be widened, especially in the wording of Annexes I and III. Annex I is, moreover, considerably strengthened by the report, since we are drawing up a very broad list of tax havens that spares no jurisdiction and that, unlike the G20 list, specifically includes Delaware and Nevada. We have defined more broadly than the Commission the legal constructions that these jurisdictions will have to show either do not exist on their territory or are fiscally transparent, and I believe that this reversal of the burden of proof is a more effective way of fighting tax evasion.
However, the main weakness of this text – and I will conclude on this – relates to the transition period granted to three Member States: Belgium, Austria and Luxembourg. Although Belgium has announced it is abandoning the system of withholding tax, I wish to see the system for the automatic exchange of information become widespread and, for this to happen, I would like a date to be set for the end of the transition period. This is why, even though we have adopted the principle of a study to assess the respective merits of the systems of withholding tax and exchange of information for 2011, when the directive is revised, we wish to see 2014 set as the end date for this transition period. I wish to say that we have tried to work in a spirit of transparency and towards improved transparency at a time when European taxpayers are required to contribute, especially in order to come to the aid of the European banking sector."@en1
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