Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-13-Speech-3-342"
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"en.20020313.13.3-342"2
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"Madam President, I would like to thank the rapporteur, Mr Pérez Royo, very warmly for his report, which makes it very clear what progress still needs to be made in this field. I would also like to thank Mr Della Vedova very sincerely for his well-balanced proposal. We all know what a difficult area EU tax coordination is. Virtually no one is talking about tax harmonisation any more. At the same time, we also know that tax competition can have very harmful effects on Europe's economies and on the choice of locations for investment in the European Union.
I would specifically like to thank Mr Della Vedova for having highlighted the issue of codecision by the European Parliament again in his role as rapporteur, since I believe that in the context of treaty reform and the discussions on a European constitution we also need to consider where the boundaries of national sovereignty lie when it comes to taxation policy. So we also need to adopt new approaches in order to define where it is in the general interest to set cornerstones for tax policy. I therefore believe that the Convention would be well advised to tackle this subject as well and to call for treaty reforms providing for a move away from the unanimity rule and towards the majority rule in EU tax policy.
We are of course still a very long way from that, if we look at this really excellent paper and the very pragmatic but at the same time very accurate paper by the Commission. The Commission has quite rightly taken stock in a rather sobering way as regards coordination. The situation on value added tax is certainly disappointing, because we are still a long way from applying the country of origin principle. The pragmatic approach adopted by the Commission should therefore be supported, even if we should never lose sight of our ultimate goal.
However, it is hard to reconcile various other areas of tax coordination with a forward-looking approach. I believe that in the case of company taxation we are still a long way from achieving what the Monti Package was at one point attempting to do. In any case, we need to make sure that tax havens are finally abolished and that favourable tax treatment for non-resident legal or natural persons, which distort competition, is finally eliminated. That should be our objective, together with the minimum requirement for uniform definitions in tax law, ranging from the basis of assessment to definitions of profit. I would very much welcome it if we in the European Parliament could agree on a single set of definitions for these arrangements. That would certainly encourage national governments to take a more progressive line."@en1
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