Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2015-10-26-Speech-1-042-000"
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"en.20151026.12.1-042-000"2
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"Madam President, the Green Group believes that we are in a tax crisis. We see governments – not just of remote tropical islands, but within our very own Union – agreeing bargain deals with multinational corporations.
As I said at the start of my speech, the central issue of the Luxleaks scandal was the lack of public information. Senior politicians, tax accountants and corporate bosses knew exactly what was going on in the cosy world of what they call tax rulings, but as a parliamentarian I knew nothing, and those I represent knew nothing. It is for this reason that the Greens in Parliament will settle for nothing less than full publication of tax information. It is only when politicians know that their deals with corporations may become known to their electors that they will act in the interest of those electors, and it is only when corporate lawyers consider the reputational damage that might follow shady tax deals that they will stop spending so much time devising these elaborate webs of tax avoidance.
Our citizens pay the price for this: seeing the public sector starved of investment and our SMEs losing out because they simply cannot compete with the low rates of tax that multinationals can arrange for themselves.
Taxation and, more importantly, tax justice is of the utmost importance for European citizens. As we approach the anniversary of the Luxleaks scandal, I wish to focus on a key issue of this debate: the question of who should know what about tax. So how much do we know? The answer is that we know a lot less than we need to in order to be able to develop policies that reassure our citizens that corporations are paying the taxes they should. As an elected representative and member of the TAXE Committee, there are still a great many vital documents that I do not have access to.
Last November, people across Europe were horrified to find out that the Commission President himself had been the architect of a secret system of sweetheart tax deals for some of the world’s most powerful corporations. Yet, without the actions of the brave whistleblower, Antoine Deltour, they would have known nothing about this.
So how can it be right that it is Deltour who is facing legal action whereas the architects of the dodgy tax deals do not face redress? Very few of the people I represent think that Deltour is the guilty party on the issue of tax avoidance.
The first real sign that the Commission means business came last week with the announcement of the results of the inquiries into the tax affairs of Starbucks and Fiat and the demand for tax to be recovered. Such inquiries still have a long way to go and, while I congratulate Commissioner Vestager on her activities so far, I would encourage her to widen and deepen her investigation.
In March this year the Commission presented a tax transparency package, which included the files that we are focussing on today. They proposed the repeal of the 2003 Savings Tax Directive, which provided tax authorities with the information they needed to ensure tax was not avoided, but has now been superseded by a new directive that has wider scope. I was the rapporteur on this repeal and I undertook a thorough investigation of the risk that it might open up loopholes to facilitate further tax avoidance. I had excellent support from my shadows, and we agreed jointly that we would support the repeal.
The Directive on Administrative Cooperation is now being extended to call for automatic exchange of information on tax rulings. So important was this piece of the package that the Council, in a break with tradition, proceeded without hearing Parliament’s position. This is extremely disappointing, as we have made some significant improvements on the Commission proposal, notably extending the scope of tax rulings considered.
However, returning to my central point, we do not believe Parliament has been ambitious enough on how information will be made available. As Greens we call for the Commission’s central directory of rulings to be made public not only to the Commission and other Member States, but for European citizens as well. This call for public information will be reintroduced as an amendment before plenary, as we believe it is what the people of Europe wish to see."@en1
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