Thu. Feb 13th, 2025

Brussels, 3 December 2024

MEPs on Tuesday heard the Chair of the Code of Conduct Group on business taxation, insisting with her that further reforms were needed, notably the listing process.

María José Garde, Chair of the Code of Conduct Group, presented the Group’s latest work and results and then fielded questions from MEPs of the Tax matters subcommittee.

Focusing on the accomplishments, Ms Garde said that the work of the Group had led to 480 tax regimes being examined within the EU and 130 of these being rolled back. Outside the EU 95 jurisdictions were under screening, with three new jurisdictions added to the process this year, Brunei, Kuwait and New Zealand. The work of the Group had led to the abolishment of 130 tax regimes outside the EU. Ms Garde told MEPs that the most important ongoing work centred around the development of the transparency criterion on beneficial ownership, which, she said, would hopefully be ready in the next couple of months.

MEPs mostly pointed out the discrepancies between the lists of non-cooperative jurisdictions drawn up by the Group and those of NGOs, and argued that the criteria which the Group used to judge a jurisdiction as non-cooperative urgently needed reform. They also argued that numerous other reforms to the Group’s work were also needed. Ms Garde replied that the goal of the Group’s work was not to get to a point of sanctioning jurisdictions but rather to foster cooperation with them and establish an ongoing dialogue, with the aim of attracting these jurisdictions into a fair tax regime system.

Surprise was also expressed by MEPs that the British Virgin Islands was recently removed from the list of non-cooperative tax jurisdictions and other questions were put about how to address the case of Gibraltar now that it was outside of the EU.

Later in the day, and tying in neatly with the hearing of Ms Garcia, MEPs also heard from European Court of Auditors member Ildikó Gáll-Pelc who presented the Court’s Special report on combatting harmful tax regimes and corporate tax avoidance.

As part of the European Parliament’s Disability Rights Week, a public hearing was also organised with experts on national tax measures to support people with disabilities in the EU.

Catch up on the meeting again

You can catch up on the meeting again by going to this page. For the hearing on tax measures to support people with disabilities scroll to 15:42. For the meeting about the European Court of Auditor’s report scroll to 16:51.

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