Tax dodging causes the EU to lose about 1 trillion euros (US$1.307 trillion) of income each year, the president of the European Council said on Friday as he announced that EU leaders would discuss the issue at a summit next month.
This hemorrhage of tax revenues is equivalent to the entire annual economic output of Spain, and far exceeds the total of about 400 billion euros committed to the bailouts of eurozone member states Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus.
“We must seize the increased political momentum to address this critical problem,” Herman Van Rompuy, who chairs meetings of EU leaders, said in a statement broadcast on the Internet. “Tax evasion is unfair to citizens who work hard and pay their share of taxes for society to work. It is unfair to companies that pay their taxes, but find it hard to compete because others don’t.”
Van Rompuy’s message, and the addition of the issue to the agenda of the summit in Brussels on May 22, will add to pressure on Austria to conform with the rest of the EU on sharing information about bank depositors.
Austria is the only one of the EU’s 27 member states unwilling to sign up to EU rules on the automatic exchange of depositor data, with the Austrian minister of finance intent on protecting Austria’s long history of banking secrecy.
EU policymakers say having all EU countries signed up to the EU savings directive, the piece of legislation that calls for sharing of depositor data, would help to combat tax evasion.
Luxembourg, which has the biggest banking sector in the EU relative to its GDP, announced this week it was willing to sign up to the directive from January 2015.
The shifting tide has raised alarm in Switzerland, the world’s biggest offshore banking center with US$2 trillion in assets, as well as in Liechtenstein. Liechtenstein Prime Minister Adrian Hasler told Swiss television on Thursday his country was well aware of mounting pressure over the issue.
“The financial center knows that at some point it may go in this direction now that there is a certain momentum in the question,” he said.
EU finance ministers, meeting in Dublin on Friday, discussed the problem, which Germany and the European Commission have said they are determined to tackle so as to close tax avoidance loopholes.
Van Rompuy said about one trillion euros was being lost across the EU each year because of tax evasion and avoidance.
“To give you an idea, one trillion euros is about the same as the entire GDP or total income of Spain, the fifth biggest economy of the European Union,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained