To see more about the latest impacts and responses link to ICIJ.
“It’s clear that we can count on a new round of revelations,” Bettel said. “We are of course continuing to look at this internally and preparing our response.”
Bettel, who took over from Juncker as Luxembourg prime minister last year, said today this time “a smaller number of tax rulings” should be revealed and that he has no certainty yet what exactly will be published next week.
New EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, a former economy minister of Denmark, has said that while “tax rulings as such” are a common practice, they may be illegal if authorities “accept that a tax base of a specific company is calculated in a favorable way.”
As a result of this publicity and pressure from the EU, Luxembourg vowed to rein in sweetheart tax deals for multinational companies after its reputation received another blow from a new wave of leaks revealing fiscal accords, that according to Bloomberg.
The nation’s Finance Ministry is pushing to set up oversight of so-called tax rulings next month as Prime Minister Xavier Bettel promised that Luxembourg is doing all it can to clean up its “damaged image.”
The “legitimacy of certain mechanisms, which are compliant with international and national law, can be put in doubt from an ethical point of view,” the finance ministry said today. “What is currently an administrative practice will be anchored in law.”
A European Union state-aid probe into agreements with Amazon.com Inc. and the revelation of thousands of pages of leaked secret tax deals with companies from around the world have shaken Luxembourg, whose population of about 550,000 enjoys the highest income per capita of any EU nation. Finance Minister Pierre Gramegna last month described the leaks as a “tsunami.”
Read more at: Tax Times blog