The Secretary of State for Tax Affairs, Fernando Rocha Andrade, said to a committee of inquiry into tax evasion that we really shouldn’t expect too much from the Panama Papers, nor from the €10 billion transferred from Portugal, that went undetected due to a ‘mistake.’
Andrade revealed today in Brussels that the Portuguese Tax Authority is 'aware' that there are 165 taxpayers in Portugal uncovered in the Panama Papers and that when the Tax Authority was alerted, it immediately joined an OECD working group ‘to exchange information and methods.’
The Secretary of State was reported as ‘participating’ in a hearing of the European Parliament's committee of inquiry looking into alleged contraventions or maladministration of the European rules on money laundering, tax evasion and avoidance. It is not yet known if he managed to stay awake throughout the entire meeting.
As for the Panama Papers, Andrade warned the committee that one should "not expect a huge result in terms of collection" from the “occasional leakage of this sort of information.”
"The Tax Authority cannot rely, for tax collection, on the fact that someone has decided to disclose a few thousand documents related to a law firm based abroad. What Portugal and the other European countries have to do is to build a system in which this information is transmitted from one country to another in a systematic way," said Andrade.
Regarding the ongoing Panama Papers investigation, which Andrade says is "complex," he added that he cannot possibly follow all the cases, as this is up to the Tax Authority, which he referred to as ‘technically autonomous’ and added that there was no deadline to complete the investigation.
The Secretary of State insisted that we should not expect any great tax income from the €10 billion that left the country entirely unsupervised and unreported. Andrade said these transfers were an awfully long time ago, between 2011 and 2015, and just because they were not logged, this doesn’t necessarily mean that there is any tax due.
As for the work of the European Parliament's committee on tax evasion, which is to travel to Lisbon on June 22nd for two days, Rocha Andrade noted that "Portugal actively participates in European mechanisms and multilateral mechanisms to combat tax evasion, in particular to combat tax evasion through 'offshores,' so naturally MEPs can count on the full cooperation of the national authorities.”
With this degree of indifference and lack of leadership from the Secretary of State, it is surprising that the Tax Authority can be bothered to collect any tax at all.
Even if Andrade is bored by the Panama Papers and the €10 billion, he could at least try and show a degree of committment and enthuiasm. Meanwhile, Portugal's taxpayers will continue to pay his salary, pay the interest on the Troika loans and refinance that country's banks that nobody in charge was much bothered about until they collapsed.
