The newly-proclaimed president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Junker who took over from our very own Sr Barroso, is coming under increasing pressure over the tax arrangements he allowed with he was the Luxembourg premier.
His record was set upon and denounced by MEPs in the European parliament, including some from the UK, France and Italy. All of the 28 new European commissioners had to attend the session for the censure motion.
He is believed to have facilitated massive corporate tax avoidance schemes during his nearly two decades in power so that multinational corporations could minimise tax despite raking in billions elsewhere in the EU.
Mr Junker became president at the beginning of November and is due to head the EU’s executive for the coming five years.
He sought to distance himself from the scandal by saying he was “no friend of big capital”.
He went on in an attempt to share the trouble by saying the “problem is not peculiarly Luxembourg, it is Europe” and blamed the tax avoidance scandal on the reluctance of national governments to harmonise corporate tax rates.
The details of Luxembourg’s record as a tax avoidance haven were given flesh in 28,000 leaked documents that revealed how the authorities, headed by Juncker, made agreements with more than 300 global companies for tax minimisation.
Mr Juncker added: “If you want me to go, say so and I will leave.”
However, the censure motion, which goes to a vote on Thursday, is not likely to get the two-thirds support it needs to pass as the two largest political groups still support Mr Juncker.
One of the few politicians from Luxembourg who spoke out against the tax schemes was Luc Dockendorf, a diplomat with the United Nations.
He and the historian Benoît Majerus wrote: “We’ve been living at the expense of others. Not just other states, but other people, like ourselves, who have been paying their taxes, while corporations in their own countries have been dodging them. It is no longer possible to pretend that the Luxembourgish model has no negative consequences for other countries.”
