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Verbatim report of proceedings
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Wednesday, 15 September 2021 - Strasbourg Revised edition

Implementation of EU requirements for exchange of tax information (debate)
MPphoto
 

  Sven Giegold, rapporteur. – Madam President, thank you colleagues for this exchange and many welcoming words. Thanks a lot to the Commission, in particular to the commitment in the opening speech to include most of our ideas in the DAC8 revision.

Now, in the closing speech, some we will see and hope that it will be rather most than some. We are looking forward to what will be coming, but thanks for this commitment. We would welcome also a clear commitment to start immediately on infringement proceedings when it comes to the lack of effective implementation, which is actually the key issue of our report.

I would like to say on the access to documents that we regarded as highly doubtful that Parliament can be treated less welcoming by the Commission and the Member States than an individual citizen. You referred to the framework agreement and therefore the part in my report, and nobody has questioned that.

We are calling on Parliament to use all legal means at its disposal in order to get the needed documents. This is actually what we now have to do up to a court proceeding if this is in the end needed, because this infringement, this report on effective implementation, we couldn’t do it properly. We say this also clearly: it is an incomplete report and we have to complete that work but for this, we need the documents from the Member States and, if needed, we have to go to court for this.

Then we have the debate on tax sovereignty. I only would like to say that the Treaty doesn’t give all the competences over direct taxation to the Member States. This is an incorrect reading of the Treaty. It only puts a unanimity requirement for this, and this has led to the unfortunate situation that for this directive, we are now working on the eighth version in only 15 years. So this unanimity requirement leads to a lack of good lawmaking and excessive bureaucracy to companies and obliges taxpayers in order to deal with these ever changing rules. Therefore, I will welcome if you could support my amendment to a move towards a majority voting.

Equally, tax competition. The amendment of the ECR, which, by the way, unfortunately did not contribute to the work unlike all the other groups, the amendment to support tax competition and see the welcoming and positive aspects. It has fallen out of time in a period when at OECD level, on global level, at European level, we move from a tax-competition model to a tax-cooperation model and therefore, colleagues, please do not support such damaging wording.

Last point, when it comes to naming problems, this Parliament must be courageous. It is not good that some groups have asked for deleting Romania from the findings, and it’s equally not good not to speak clearly about new revelations on Luxembourg.

Let us be courageous and don’t do party politics on this. Let us name and shame where things are not working well, and therefore I appeal to your support to my report and also refuting all the weakening amendments. Thanks for your work and we will continue together on this.

 
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