These tax havens strangle the EU
To get Oliver Bullough’s weekly Oligarchy delivered straight into your inbox sign up here
SURPRISE EU HYPOCRISY ON TAX HAVENS
The European Union doesn’t like tax havens, which is why – twice a year – it publishes a list of “non-cooperative jurisdictions,” so as to highlight places that are undermining its efforts to tackle not just illegal tax evasion and money laundering, but also tax avoidance – “the use of legal means to minimize tax liability”. This is apparently a principled stance, about defending the spirit of the law, as well as its letter.
Of course, the EU’s approach to tax havens is not without its critics –here’s what I had to say about it in October– and some of those critics are from within European institutions.
- “While the list can be a good tool, member states forgot something when composing it: actual tax havens. The truth is, the list is not getting better, it's getting worse. Guernsey, the Bahamas and now the Cayman Islands are only some of the well-known tax havens that member states have taken off the list,” said Members of the European Parliament in a motion adopted earlier this year.
Still though, that’s just a technicality. In general, the European Union must be fully onboard with the effort to impose a global minimum tax rate to force multinational companies to pay taxes to the countries from which they extract profits, right? Well, no, actually. This is where things get, as my kids might say, totally awkward.