Meeting of the Special Committee on Tax Rulings in the EP in brussels. Statements by Alain LAMASSOURE (EPP,FR), Chair of the TAXE Committee, Elisa FERREIRA (S&D,PT)and Michael THEURER (ALDE,DE), rapporteurs and statement by Edouard PERRIN, Journalist.

Brussels

statement

meeting

fight against tax fraud and evasion (T)

LAMASSOURE, Alain (EPP, FR)

THEURER, Michael (ALDE, DE)

Special Committee on Tax Rulings and Other Measures Similar in Nature or Effect

FERREIRA, Elisa (S&D, PT, EC)

Meeting of the Special Committee on Tax Rulings: statements by Alain LAMASSOURE (EPP,FR), Chair of the TAXE Committee, Elisa FERREIRA (S&D,PT)and Michael THEURER (ALDE,DE), rapporteurs and by Edouard PERRIN, Journalist

SOUNDBITE (French), Alain LAMASSOURE (EPP, FR), Chair of the TAXE committee, "We have a mandate, on the one hand, to take a photograph of what fiscal law looks like in the 28 Member States of the EU, law that applies to company profits. The practices of the application of this law, because you notice that in over a dozen countries, the administration has quite an important margin of manoeuvre to interpret the law. And with that as point of departure, make recommendations in order to stop practices, that everybody by now understands are scandalous, since they allow the biggest and richest companies and multinationals to escape from a very large part of their tax dues."

SOUNDBITE (French), Alain LAMASSOURE (EPP, FR), Chair of the TAXE committee, "We don't want this committee to last for years, because we have at the moment a political momentum, there is an expectation from public opinion because of Luxleaks, so we have to answer to this expectation.In a year, public opinion will be interested in something else. At the same time we can't progress in this area, the fiscal area, it is not the competence of the EU, the EU can describe and recommend, but it cannot decide. It is a national competence. And we can only advance things in the fiscal area with the agreement of the 28 countries, the agreement of the 28 finance ministers."

SOUNDBITE (French), Alain LAMASSOURE (EPP, FR), Chair of the TAXE committee, "No government can afford to appear like the one who steals the taxes of the others, really. When you attract a company to your country, by promising to undertax it in comparison to his country of origin, you steal riches."

SOUNDBITE (English), Elisa FERREIRA (S&amp;D, PT), Rapporteur, "We expect to have much more information, details, that can help us go into the content of the tax situation in Europe. We already know what has been published,but now we have the oportunity to put very precise questions and get hopefully, very precise answers, and this is absolutely essential for us."

SOUNDBITE (English), Elisa FERREIRA (S&amp;D, PT), Rapporteur, "It is a part of the media and a lot of public information that we reassess they way in which Europe has been addressing this problem, because the unanimity in the Council has been a huge blocking stone in the process of having more transparency and more coordination of taxes across Europe, so one of the outcomes could be that we establish a new culture in what concerns tax systems in Europe, or at least in the Euro zone."

SOUNDBITE (English), Michael THEURER (ALDE, DE), Rapporteur, "The whistle blowers, they are partly protected in camera, because we have the very bad situation that citizens who inform about tax crimes are prosecuted in another country. I think that cannot be explained to anybody, because if you are a citizen who realises that there is a tax fraud against a Member State of the EU,that person who reveals that crime should not be punished in another Member State. I think that is really not satisfactory."

SOUNDBITE (English), Michael THEURER (ALDE, DE), Rapporteur, "We have informations that almost all of the 28 countries are involved in the problem of aggressive tax planning and tax avoidance, and are not cooperating in the way they should do, and we have to investigate as well. And therefore a major demand is that the finance ministers should come to our committee and explain why they couldn't solve the problem in the past." 

SOUNDBITE (English), Edouard PERRIN, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists , "The trouble with this is that if you don't have the true investigative powers in order to be able to fetch documents, have the power to summon people to come and answer your questions then in tax issues you lack leverage. We'll see what happens with this committee but, I have fears that some documents won't be handed over to the committee."

SOUNDBITE (English), Edouard PERRIN, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists , "(In reference to Marius Kohl who signed all the tax rulings in Luxembourg)  It's just an example, because that person is now retired, but he's the civil servant that signed and stamped most of the agreements we saw, and I am very curious to know what this person has to say publicly on the record about his job at the time. Because he gave only one interview in the Wall Street Journal, and when asked how he could check the figures companies were putting in front of him before stamping it, he did not answer, he just licked his thumb and held it in the air, in a way of saying 'I had no way of checking the figures.' So its a very serious issue, how the a single civil servant that was stamping those schemes did verify them."