This week, European Union finance ministers agreed to establish a common EU blacklist of so-called “non-cooperative jurisdictions” – in other words, tax havens. With one tax scandal unfolding after the other, listing and sanctioning tax havens may seem like a good solution. However, as tempting as it may sound, this EU exercise is doomed to fail – and here’s why. The proposal
for a common blacklist stems from the European Commission’s external strategy on tax, which was published this January. However,
tax havens are not an external matter to the EU, quite the contrary – some of
the world’s most powerful tax havens are to be found in Europe.
For
example, a new report from Oxfam uses European Commission (EC) data
to analyse the role of the Netherlands as ...