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European Union flags flutter outside the EU Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium May 5, 2021. REUTERS/Yves Herman

The European Commission wants to propose in 2023 a more unified way of taxing companies in the European Union, hoping that such rules, which have failed to win support in the past, will stand a better chance if they follow global OECD solutions expected this year.

The Commission will present a plan on Tuesday including this proposal and other measures for adjusting the EU's business taxation to make it more up to date with the modern world, where cross-border business, often carried out via the Internet, is commonplace.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is to agree in June on global rules on where to tax large multinational corporations like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft and at what effective minimum rate.

The deal is aimed at stopping governments competing with each other through lowering tax rates to attract investment and at creating a way to tax profits in countries where the customers are rather than where a company sets up its office for tax purposes.

The Commission wants to use the OECD deal to propose more unified rules for business taxation for the 27 EU countries, which currently have 27 different tax systems.

"The forthcoming global agreement will mark a decisive step ... in the reform of the international corporate tax system," read a draft statement prepared by the Commission for Tuesday and seen by Reuters.

"At EU level, we must build on this progress and take forward a similarly ambitious business taxation agenda that ensures fair and effective taxation," it said.

The Commission will propose "Business in Europe: Framework for Income Taxation" or BEFIT: a set of corporate tax rules for the whole of the EU which would allow taxing the same things across the bloc and the allocation of profits for taxation at national rates between EU countries according to a formula.

Key considerations for the formula would include how to give appropriate weight to sales by destination and how to reflect the importance of the market where a multinational group does business. Also important will be how assets, including intangible ones, and labour should be reflected to ensure a balanced distribution of corporate tax revenue across countries with different economic profiles, the draft said.

In a box on the draft statement spelling out a commitment on when the Commission aims to put forward its corporate tax proposal it put a date of 2023.

UNIFIED BUSINESS TAX RULES TO HELP ECONOMY

The Commission believes BEFIT would reduce barriers to cross-border investment, cut red tape and compliance costs in the EU's single market of 450 million people, combat tax avoidance and support jobs, growth and investment.

It would also provide a simpler and fairer way to allocate taxation rights between EU countries and ensure reliable and predictable corporate tax revenues for governments.

But the Commission's ideas for EU corporate taxation rules have failed before.

Since setting tax rates is a jealously guarded prerogative of parliaments, the Commission proposed in 2011 the EU should at least unify what they tax, rather than how much, in a proposal called the Common Corporate Consolidated Tax Base (CCCTB).

But the proposal went nowhere because many EU governments saw it as a foot in the door for the EU to have a say on national tax policies and potentially on actual tax rates later.

"While the principles of a common tax base and of formulary apportionment already featured in the previous CCCTB proposal, the new proposal will reflect the significant changes in the economy and in the international framework," the draft said.

"Most notably, it will seek to build on the approach taken in the forthcoming global agreement in its proposals for the definition of the tax base," it said.

"It will also feature a different apportionment formula, which will better reflect the realities of todays economy and global developments, in particular by taking better account of digitalisation," the draft said.

The Commission also plans to propose next year an EU law forcing large multinationals to publish the effective tax rate they pay in the EU and, by the end of this year, it plans to present a law against the abusive use of shell companies set up just to minimise the tax bill.

By the first quarter of next year the Commission wants to propose a law that would make it less attractive for companies to finance themselves through debt from a tax point of view, and more attractive to use equity.

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EU eyes another go at more unified European business taxation - Reuters

European Commission trustbuster Margrethe Vestager has her sights set on Apple Pay.Photo: ECR Group/Flickr CC

The European Union has warned Apple that regulators investigation into Apple Pay is going ahead. In an interview with Bloomberg News, EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said the Apple Pay case is quite advanced and something that were pushing forward.

The gist of the Apple Pay investigation is whether Apple gives its mobile payments solution an unfair advantage over the competition. In late 2019, EU antitrust investigators sent banks and rival payment services a questionnaire on this topic. The European Commission subsequently opened a formal antitrust probe into Apple Pay in June 2020.

Apple Pay did not launch until late 2014, making the service late to the mobile payments scene. However, while Apple Pay may not be the first technology people think of when they think Apple, its nonetheless become an increasingly important area for the company. According to a Financial Times report published at the end of last year, roughly half the people who own an iPhone use Apple Pay. The service could help facilitate 1 in 10 credit card transactions worldwide by 2025. Apple takes approximately 0.15% of each transaction.

The Financial Times quoted a lawyer who said the EU is clearly focused on Apple:

Thomas Vinje, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance who has worked on Spotifys competition complaint against Apple, said EU regulators are keen to put Apple Pay high on their agenda. It is clear to me that there is a very large appetite toward pursuing antitrust cases towards Apple, he said. There is political momentum behind it.'

A Bloombergreport from September 2020 said the EU is considering making a law that would require Apple to open up its NFC technology for other mobile payment services beyond Apple Pay.Apple argues that this could increase fraud and the possibility of security breaches.

EU competition chief Vestager said this week that the EU is following very closely the current Epic Games v. Apple court case in the United States. The European Union has another investigation currently probing Apples control of the App Store. Specifically, this deals with Apple Music and its competitors. However, she said the U.S. outcome wont dictate European law.

We would have to do our own thing no matter the outcome of the U.S. casework, she said.

Source: Bloomberg

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European Union pushes ahead with investigation into Apple Pay - Cult of Mac

Britain wants to see progress soon in talks with the European Union on solving the post-Brexit Northern Irish border riddle, with its minister in charge of ties with the bloc urging member states to meet their obligations.

After the United Kingdom left the European Union's orbit at the end of last year, checks were introduced on some goods moving from mainland Britain to Northern Ireland, which has a land border with EU member Ireland.

The checks triggered anger and a perception among pro-British unionists in Northern Ireland that the Brexit deal divides them from the rest of the United Kingdom, a shift they say could sink the 1998 peace deal that brought an end to three decades of violence there.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had promised there would be unfettered trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, unilaterally extended a grace period on certain checks to minimise supply disruption, a move Brussels said breached the Brexit divorce deal.

David Frost, the minister in charge of ties with the EU, said he wanted the bloc to meet its obligations under the Brexit deal to try to minimise barriers in trade between Britain and the province, but had yet to have the conversation. read more

He also said there should be progress before July 12, when Northern Irish loyalists gather to mark the 1690 victory at the Battle of the Boyne by Protestant King William of Orange over Catholic King James of England and Scotland.

"I would like to feel that we will be making progress with the EU in good time before that date," he told a parliamentary committee.

Earlier, the BBC said Britain was asking the EU to introduce checks slowly. From October, checks on fresh meat products could begin, extending to dairy products, plants and wine from the end of Jan. 2022, the BBC reported.

Irish Prime Minister Michel Martin said separately he wanted the deal to work, adding he did not get an immediate sense from his meeting with Johnson that London wanted to rewrite the trading arrangements, as reported this week in the Irish media. read more

"We were very clear and are very clear that this is an international agreement, commitments have been made and it needs to be worked, and the processes that are in it need to be worked also," Martin told an online event when asked about the Irish national broadcaster RTE report.

Preserving the delicate peace without allowing the United Kingdom a back door into the EU's single market via the Irish border was one of the most difficult issues of nearly four years of tortuous talks on the terms of Britain's exit from the bloc.

Some fear the dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol, designed to prevent a "hard" border, could spill over into violent protest in the province in the coming months.

Britain's retail industry lobby group on Monday called for urgent talks between the major supermarket groups it represents and European Union and British officials to discuss proposed new post-Brexit Irish Sea border checks for food products.

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Britain calls for progress with EU on post-Brexit Northern Irish trade - Reuters UK

May 15th 2021

AMERICANS CAN always be counted on to do the right thing, Winston Churchill is supposed to have quipped, after they have exhausted all other possibilities. There are two problems with the quotation. First, there is no evidence Churchill ever said it. Second, today the phrase applies better to Europes leadership than to their friends across the Atlantic.

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Take the European Unions recovery from the pandemic. For the first time since last spring, economic optimism is in the air. Across Europe, vaccines are going into arms, summer holidays are being booked and bars are opening up. The European Commission has just jacked up its growth forecasts for 2021 and 2022, citing the blocs 750bn ($910bn) recovery fund as one of the reasons why. This cash should start appearing in European treasuries later this year. As a whole, the EUs GDP will be back at its pre-pandemic level by the end of 2021. This is slightly faster than expected and is due to happen only a few months behind America, which has had the benefit of Donald Trump and Joe Bidens blockbuster stimulus packages. In the ten-year gap between their initially bungling response to the euro-zone crisis and the pandemic, European leaders seem to have learned some lessons, even if they still have not learned them thoroughly enough.

Where the European Central Bank was actively making things worse a decade ago, it is now helping governments out of their hole. In the spring of 2011 the bank was raising rates and worrying about a brief flurry of inflation, rather than stagnant growth. It was not treated as a lender of last resort until a year later, when Mario Draghi finally pledged to do whatever it takes to save the euro. Then began Mr Draghis long, slow crusade to make the ECB adopt unorthodox measures, such as quantitative easing. As a result the bank is able today to print money, (largely) ignore inflation hawks and keep interest rates at historic lows. Its official mandate of price stability has been replaced by an unofficial creed of supporting economic growth, reducing unemployment and doing whatever it takes.

If the technocrats have changed their tune, so, to some extent, have the politicians. Long-held political certainties have been revisited. During the previous crisis common debt was suggested as a necessary step to guarantee the future of the euro, only to be dismissed by the likes of Angela Merkel, Germanys chancellor. Mrs Merkel reversed course last May. After a year of haggling, the commission will begin to issue up to 750bn of the stuff, which will be dished out to countries in the form of cheap loans and grants. True, on a continental level, the scheme is tiny. But for some of the individual countries most in need of the cash it is significant. In Germany, it is a piddling 1% of its GDP. For Italy, though, the figure is about 11% of GDP. Greece, meanwhile, is due 32bn of loans and grantsa useful sum for an economy of roughly 170bn.

For rich countries, EU funds are a fiscal aperitif. It is up to national governments to pump up their economies in the post-crisis era. Here, again, attitudes have changed, though not yet enough. In contrast to a decade ago, spending is now more likely to be seen as a solution than a sin. Countries such as Greece endured economic vivisection, forced to slash spending rather than stimulate their economies. This approach failed either to reduce Greek debt or to produce faster growth. These days, advocates of a return to austerity are thinner on the ground.

With luck, political circumstance could embed this new attitude permanently in the EUs own rules on government spending. Although temporarily suspended during the pandemic, EU countries are obliged to keep deficits below 3% and national debt below 60% of GDP. In an age when the national debt of Italy, the third-largest EU economy, stands at about 160% of GDP, these rules can seem quaint. Europes struggling southern economies have called for an overhaul ever since the previous crisis. Now they may get their wish. Frances president, Emmanuel Macron, has long advocated more forgiving fiscal rules. So has Mr Draghi, now the prime minister of Italy. Meanwhile the rise of the Green Party means that the next German government will probably be the most profligate in a generation. It is a rare alignment which could, just possibly, lead to a more permanent shift.

Boom-mongers have not yet routed the doom-mongers. There is plenty of opportunity to muck things up. Inflation still haunts European politics. While the noises coming from the ECB suggest that a modest rise in inflation this year will be brushed off, this claim will only be properly tested when German politicians start screaming. (The upcoming election will give plenty of excuses for such hysterics.) An improved economic outlook may lessen the pressure on countries to overhaul the EUs spending rules. Rather than turning the recovery fund into a permanent scheme, ready to issue more debt if needed, some governments will try to keep it a temporary one, setting up a needless drama about rebuilding it in the next crisis. The tyranny of low expectations hangs over the EU. In the previous crisis, mere survival was enough, never mind prosperity. Now waddling only slightly behind Americas economynever mind Chinasis being held up as an achievement. For a bloc with designs on being a superpower, that is not enough.

Yet the EU is stronger than its critics allow. It can correct its errors, albeit slowly. It took a decade to unpick the mistakes of the previous crisis. So long as the EU is not a state, it will not have the speed, power or flexibility of one. Across the Atlantic Mr Biden can launch a plan to spend trillions, knowing he has the power to do so. By contrast, EU politics is kaleidoscopic. Consensus must be cooked up among a rotating cast of ministers and amid ever-changing alliances. Reluctant countries have to be slowly cajoled. A stronger, more coherent EU is coming, but not for a while. It could still take a lot longer to exhaust the other options.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Whatever it took?"

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Can the European Union learn from its fiscal mistakes? - The Economist

Today, the European Union, in partnership with the Somaliland Ministry of Employment, Social Affairs and Family, launched two new projects to combat Sexual Gender Based Violence (SGBV) and all forms of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Somaliland.

Today, the European Union, in partnership with the Somaliland Ministry of Employment, Social Affairs and Family, launched two new projects to combat Sexual Gender Based Violence (SGBV) and all forms of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Somaliland, which will be implemented by Candlelight and Health Poverty Action. The projects were selected as part of the EUs support to civil society and human rights.

Violence against women and girls remains one of the most serious threats to their health and safety in the world. The situation is critical in Somaliland, where women and girls are at higher risk of rape, early and forced marriage, and FGM. Despite being internationally recognized as a human rights violation, it is estimated that almost 99% of girls and women aged 15 to 49 in Somaliland have been subjected to the harmful practice, which is the highest percentage in the world. Today, there is an alarming trend of medicalization of FGM, where the procedure is carried out by medical personnel.

The Government of Somaliland is committed to zero tolerance for all forms of Female Genital Mutilation. We have established an inter-Ministerial taskforce to finalize the long standing anti FGM policy, we already started to engage with civil society organizations and government line ministries to support the approval of the zero tolerance anti FGM policy, H.E Mustafe Mohamoud Ali, Minister, Ministry of Employment, Social Affairs and Family stated.

We take note of the governments commitment to end all forms of FGM in Somaliland, European Union Ambassador Nicols Berlanga replied. This gives us great encouragement to support the government and civil society actors to make this commitment a reality.

Hundreds of young innocent girls are subjected to cutting everyday while there are much more girls at risk. The way to tackle this practice is to have a law banning all forms of FGM. We need to speed up our efforts; there is no better time to have the law than now, stated Nafis Network Programme Manager Hibo Mohamoud.

At the national level, the projects are aligned with the priorities of the Somaliland National Development Plan, and will build on communities increased awareness of the need to end sexual and gender-based violence, and adopting a zero tolerance approach to female genital mutilation.

The project implemented by Candlelight, Accelerating Change to Abandon SGBV and FGM, aims at opening the civic and democratic space and promoting the rights of women and girls by adopting a rights-based, community-led approach to reducing sexual and gender-based violence, including all forms female genital mutilation.

The project implemented by HPA, Somaliland Termination Oppression of women and girls Programme II (STOP II) works to reduce the prevalence of SGBV and FGM through both a top-down and bottom-up approach, influencing communities and stakeholders at all levels to ensure that changes to social norms are structural and sustainable, while supporting legislations to abandon all forms of FGM and lobbying to pass the Sexual Offenses Bill.

For more information contact:

Candlelight: abdirizaqlibah@candlelightsom.org (link sends e-mail)

Health Poverty Action m.dahir@healthpovertyaction.or.ke (link sends e-mail)

European Union: delegation-somalia@eeas.europa.eu

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The European Union launches two projects combatting Sexual and Gender Based Violence and Female Genital Mutilation in Somaliland - Somalia - ReliefWeb