The EU has ‘ample room’ to take a ‘pragmatic approach’ to trade with the City of London after Brexit, states the OECD in its 2017 Business and Finance Outlook.
European finance ministers have agreed a draft directive to improve the EU’s double taxation dispute resolution mechanisms. The directive will make these mechanisms mandatory and binding, with clear time limits for reaching agreement.
The European Parliament has voted to extend by three months its inquiry committee, set up in June 2016, into matters surrounding the ‘Panama papers’. The inquiry was initially intended to report after 12 months.
The European Council has given the formal go-ahead for the Commission to open the Article 50 negotiations with the UK. The Commission’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, has outlined his provisional timetable for the negotiations.
The OECD invites comments by 30 June 2017 on a discussion draft of guidance on the approach to pricing transfers of hard-to-value intangibles, as required by the final report on Action 8–10 of the BEPS action plan.
HMRC has issued a reminder to financial institutions that the deadline for submitting automatic exchange of information (AEOI) returns for the year ended 31 December 2016 is 31 May 2017.
The European Commission has presented its 2017 country specific recommendations, setting out economic policy guidance for individual member states for the next 12 to 18 months.
Speaking to the press after the meeting of ECOFIN on 23 May, European Commission vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis gave an update on the Council’s debate on a directive for an EU common consolidated corporate tax base (CCCTB).
Tax reform is essential to stimulating growth in the world’s economies, as multinational firms invest less, causing productivity and wages to stall, argues Liam Byrne, former chief secretary to the Treasury, in ‘A new agenda for inclusive growth’, an article for the OECD Yearbook.
A new OECD report finds that transferring a third of the additional revenues from carbon pricing reforms to poor households, by means of an income-tested cash transfer, would reduce energy affordability risks by more than 10% on average across the 20 countries considered in the report.