The special committee has provisionally been called Taxe 3 and follows the Pana inquiry which looked into tax affairs uncovered by the Panama Papers.
In a wide ranging tax remit, Taxe 3 will look at:
- the progress by member states to remove practices that allow tax avoidance and/or tax evasion and that are harmful for proper functioning of the single market;
- how EU VAT rules were circumvented in the framework of the Paradise Papers and to evaluate more in general the impact of VAT fraud and administrative cooperation rules in the EU;
- assessing national schemes providing tax privileges for new residents or foreign income (such as citizenship programmes); and,
- assessing the impact of the EU non-cooperation blacklist.
The 45 member committee will spend 12 months considering the Paradise Papers leak, which is simultaneously the subject of a court case in the UK between law firm Appleby and newspaper the Guardian and the BBC’s Panorama television programme.
Appleby is claiming the papers show no wrongdoing and the journalists have unjustifiably breached client privacy.
The committee will be watched closely within the context of Brexit for indications the bloc would follow through on a threat EU would blacklist the UK once outside the EU in March 2019.
