The new president of the European Commission has come under renewed pressure over the tax avoidance schemes instituted in Luxembourg when he was prime minister.
Now the EU executive has said it will see that legislation is quickly put in place to better scrutinise tax avoidance deals for big corporations.
Although Jean-Claude Juncker last week survived a motion of censure over the issue, brought by several far-right parties, it has not gone away.
The new legislation would oblige EU governments to share information on agreements they have made with multinationals, specifying how much corporation tax they are expected to pay.
France, Germany and Italy demanded tougher, binding regulations and declared that the practices in Luxembourg while Juncker was prime minister for 18 years had made the response more urgent.
They said their citizens and their companies expected them to deal with “tax avoidance and aggressive planning”.
Last month, media analysis of 28,000 leaked documents revealed that authorities in Luxembourg helped 340 large firms minimise their tax payments, some to just 1%.
The European Commission is already investigating the arrangements between Luxembourg and Amazon as well as a subsidiary of Fiat.
The revelations hit the public just days after Mr Juncker took up his five-year post as president of the European Commission, following on from Portugal’s own Sr. Barroso.
Last week Mr Juncker said Luxembourg had no choice but to act the way it did because other EU countries were doing the same.
