EU finance chiefs announce measures targeting tax evasion

The European Union unveiled a raft of measures to tackle tax evasion as finance chiefs attempted to wrestle the issue back from populist groups using the Panama leaks to argue that governments turn a blind eye to inequality.

The EU’s economy chiefs, buffeted by anti-establishment anger from London to Madrid, showed a united front at a two-day gathering of the ministers by agreeing to work on a stepped-up regimen of tax transparency and tax-haven blacklists.

“The risk of populism is very real if we don’t act forcefully enough or quickly enough,” French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said in an interview Saturday in Amsterdam. “People will get the impression that we’re supporting an unfair system, one with two different sets of rules. We can’t be behind the curve on this.”

The leak this month of millions of pages of financial records from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, exposing billions of dollars hidden in tax havens around the world, comes as populist groups have made inroads at the ballot box with a mix of anti-elitism and criticism of austerity measures.

The EU’s finance ministers meeting Friday and Saturday in the Dutch capital agreed to work together to come up with a joint tax-haven blacklist and common sanctions against them, to replace the existing situation where nations have individual lists. They also agreed to exchange information on the beneficial owners of companies and to explore tougher anti-tax avoidance and anti-money laundering rules.

“When the Panama papers were revealed, it was seen as both a danger and an opportunity,” European Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici told reporters. “The danger is that the public would take this as a confirmation that ‘they’re all bad, they’re all the same’ — this would obviously fuel populism but it’s an extraordinary political opportunity; it gives us additional arguments.”

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