EU Commissioner for Taxation and the Single Market, Fritz Bolkestein, paid a visit on Gordon Brown at the UK Treasury this week in response to the UK's proposal to use information exchange to resolve the impasse over the EU's proposed withholding tax. Discussions were reported to be friendly, but inconclusive.
Bolkestein accepts that the withholding tax proposal is going nowhere at present, and that it is impossible to find a workable way of exempting the Eurobond market while implementing the tax across the EU more generally.
The UK's paper presented last week proposed that banking secrecy should be dismantled in all major world financial centres as a prelude to the imposition of a withholding tax, which would minimise the threat posed by the tax to existing EU centres of financial services such as London and Frankfurt. The argument is, that if an investor knows his transactions will be reported to his home tax authority, he will have no incentive to desert one capital market in favour of another.
Information exchange was contained in the stalled tax directive as an alternative to a withholding tax, but this Utopian (or simply cynical) proposal met with immediate refusal from other EU member states who won't contemplate abandoning their existing banking secrecy laws. If EU member states won't exchange information, what chance is there that other countries will do so, let alone IOFCs, whose whole livelihood depends on their ability to attract footloose investors?
Frits Bolkestein said after the meeting that it was important for the EU to agree its own principles of information exchange first, and that trying to globalise the problem would simply delay it: "If one has to wait for global agreement, one can wait until kingdom come."
The Treasury denies that Britain's proposals represented a delaying tactic. Perfidious Albion indeed!
.
Network Tweets
Network BlogsContent
provided by
|
Archive | Resources | Partners | Site Map | Links | Newsletter Archive | Contact | RSS Feeds | About | Syndication | Advertising & Marketing | Recruitment | Terms & Conditions | Privacy & Cookies
Copyright © 2012 - All Rights Reserved - Tax-News.com
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Tax-News.com has taken reasonable care in sourcing and presenting the information contained on this site, but accepts no responsibility for any financial or other loss or damage that may result from its use. In particular, users of the site are advised to take appropriate professional advice before committing themselves to involvement in offshore jurisdictions, offshore trusts or offshore investments.
Write a comment