"Last week, the European Union’s executive body, the European Commission, advised member states to create blacklists of tax havens and adopt anti-abuse rules. Tax evasion and avoidance, which cost the EU 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) a year, are “scandalous” and “an attack on the fundamental principle of fairness,” Algirdas Semeta, the EC’s commissioner for taxation, said at a press conference in Brussels."
This is the issue. The Euro-zone is in a world of hurt and having a few hundred billion euros would "fix" that problem. So they are gearing up to change their tax laws, which is going to be a huge fight (taking money from wealthy people or corporations is always strongly resisted by those people).
I see it as a side effect of the EU fiscal problem in general (the root of which is non-soverign control over fiscal policy and enforcement) and suspect it will impact Europe at least as much as the end of the cold war did, if not more. I'm not entirely comfortable predicting what those effects will be.
"Last week, the European Union’s executive body, the European Commission, advised member states to create blacklists of tax havens and adopt anti-abuse rules. Tax evasion and avoidance, which cost the EU 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) a year, are “scandalous” and “an attack on the fundamental principle of fairness,” Algirdas Semeta, the EC’s commissioner for taxation, said at a press conference in Brussels."
This is the issue. The Euro-zone is in a world of hurt and having a few hundred billion euros would "fix" that problem. So they are gearing up to change their tax laws, which is going to be a huge fight (taking money from wealthy people or corporations is always strongly resisted by those people).
I see it as a side effect of the EU fiscal problem in general (the root of which is non-soverign control over fiscal policy and enforcement) and suspect it will impact Europe at least as much as the end of the cold war did, if not more. I'm not entirely comfortable predicting what those effects will be.