Plenary focus - Avril

The Commission talks about transparency, yet omits most major tax havens from what they call country-by-country reporting by turning it into EU-reporting only. This is absolutely unacceptable in light of all the recent scandals. Anything less than showing where multinationals pay tax - and where they don’t - is empty talk. It didn’t harm the banks and so it should be extended to all corporations operating across borders, including the 85 per cent of corporations with annual turnover below the excessively generous threshold of 750 million euros.

The Panama Papers make it obvious: We need much stronger tools against tax havens, starting with source taxation on nancial ows into these jurisdictions and including meaningful sanctions such as the revocation of business licences against those banks and lawyers assisting tax evaders and money launderers. The European Parliament should set up a permanent sub-committee for tax matters to maintain a high level of pressure on member states and the European Commission.

This directive makes the collection and retention of air travel passenger data mandatory throughout the EU. Just like the retention of telecommunications data, this is a strong violation of the fundamental right to privacy and has no proven use in the ght against terrorism or crime. We reject such an invasive yet useless measure and will vote against it