Sharon signs open letter to ECOFIN Ministers calling for country-by-country reporting

Sharon Bowles MEP today joined with two colleagues from other political groups to send an open letter to all ECOFIN Ministers* calling for country-by-country reporting for financial transparency. The letter reads:

Dear Minister,

You will no doubt be aware of the protracted negotiations on the Capital Requirements Directive and Regulation (CRD4/CRR). You may not be aware, however, that the EP has put forward a sensible and very short transparency article requiring banks to disclose - on a country-by-country level - key business figures including profits, taxes paid, and subsidies received.

Given the crucial and central role banks play in our economy, and the enormous public subsidies they have received from our governments at the expense of ordinary EU taxpayers, we hope that you will share the ambition to provide European citizens and investors with this limited but essential set of data. This is also entirely in line with the most recent declarations at the G 20 and the G 8 levels concerning fair corporate taxation.

Your representatives in Brussels have argued that, if at all, this should be at earliest dealt with in a revision of the transparency and accounting directives in several years. This amounts to telling our citizens that for the time being, they are not authorized to know how much profit, how much taxes and how many subsidies the banks that operate in their country have paid or received. We, the EP negotiators, and more recently Commissioner Barnier, believe this to be unjustifiable and therefore we very much insist on the need for this to be fully addressed in the CRD4 negotiations.

We do not understand the need for delay and we believe that the EU must act now.
We hereby ask you to join with us and to publically support the European Parliament on this important issue for EU citizens. If you cannot support this position we would be most interested to hear your reasons as to why.

Please find enclosed a possible compromise proposal.

Thank you very much

Kind regards,

Udo Bullmann, Member of the European Parliament, S&D Group

Sharon Bowles, Member of the European Parliament, ALDE Group

Philippe Lamberts, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA Group

Compromise proposal:

Article country-by-country reporting for financial institutions:

1. Member States shall require institutions to prepare and publish a report specifying, by Member State and by third country in which it has operations, the following information on a consolidated basis for the financial year:

(a) Profit or loss before tax;

(b) Tax on profit or loss;

(c) Turnover

(d) Number of employees

(e) Public subsidies received.

2. The report referred to in the first paragraph shall be audited in accordance with Directive 2006/43/EC of 17 May 2006 on statutory audits of annual accounts and consolidated accounts.

* Ecofin is an acronym for the European Union's Economic and Financial Affairs Council which is made up of the Finance Ministers of the 27 European Union members.

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