Members of the European Parliament have expressed near unanimous outrage and disgust towards ministers and politicians who make use of tax havens.
Revelations from the Pandora Papers show that they thereby evade paying taxes in their own countries, while the European Parliament has been calling for the abolition of tax havens for more than ten years.
During a plenary debate with representatives from the Council of Ministers and the European Commission, MEPs condemned EU governments for allowing widespread tax avoidance through their inability to reform tax legislation.
Although some MEPs acknowledged that limited progress has been made in improving EU laws, they agreed with the rest that many EU countries do far too little to close the long-known loopholes in tax laws.
The MEPs emphasized that an international agreement on tax arrangements must be urgently concluded and quickly implemented into European law.
They also pointed to the conflict of interest arising for high-ranking politicians named in the Pandora Papers, such as EU ministers and heads of state, since they also sit on bodies intended to tackle tax avoidance and evasion.
The 27 European finance ministers updated their blacklist on Tuesday with countries suspected of facilitating tax avoidance. The ministers do this twice a year. The latest update coincides with disclosures about some ministers and politicians, such as Dutch Minister Hoekstra and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who invested in investment structures in the British Virgin Islands, an archipelago known as a tax haven.
The European blacklist, established in 2017 amid all the uproar over tax evasion, has in recent years only gotten shorter. Currently, in addition to the American Virgin Islands, the list includes American Samoa, Fiji, Guam, Palau, Panama, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, and Vanuatu.
MEPs such as PvdA member Paul Tang and Sven Giegold of the Greens call the EU list a sham because EU countries never put each other on it. Oxfam has also been critical for years.