Ten countries strike tentative deal on FTT
Ten EU member states agree to tax transactions involving shares and a limited number of derivative products as of 2016, though many details remain to be decided.
Ten European Union member states today (6 May) announced that they had struck a political deal to introduce a tax on all share transactions from January 2016.
The tax would also apply to the buying and selling of certain derivative products, the group of ten countries said in a statement, without providing any detail.
The ten member states – Austria, Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain – said that they would finalise the details before the end of the year. Participating member states will be free to increase the scope of the tax within their own territories.
The announcement marks the first advance since January 2013, when originally eleven member states announced that they would pursue a European Commission proposal for a financial transaction tax. (The eleventh member state, Slovenia, has put its participation on hold pending the formation of a new government.) The move was was vetoed by member states including the United Kingdom.
George Osborne (pictured), the United Kingdom’s finance minister, said that the tax was not a tax on bankers but “a tax on jobs, a tax on investments, a tax on people’s pensions and on pensioners”.
He said that the UK would challenge the final legislation if it proved to have spill-over costs for the UK economy.
A number of finance ministers, including Osborne, Anders Borg, Sweden’s finance minister and Margrethe Vestager, Denmark’s minister for the economy, criticised the lack of transparency in the negotiating process and queried whether the ten member states had even considered the question of spill-over effects on non-participating countries.
“You have decided you must come out with something before the [European Parliament] elections, but we [the finance ministers from non-particpating member states] need to know more,” said Jeroen Dijsselbloem, Holland’s finance minister.
Luis Guindos, Spain’s finance minister, said that the deal was a “minimum outcome” and the tax was “sensible and prudent”.