‘Eurotax’ call axed from EU blueprint

Date: 28/06/01

By David Cronin

Contentious calls for an EU-wide tax were omitted from the new Benelux blueprint on Europe's future because of Dutch opposition, Belgium's foreign minister Louis Michel has admitted.

Michel told European Voice that the Netherlands insisted there should be no mention of the 'Eurotax' in the memorandum on the bloc's development, which it, Belgium and Luxembourg unveiled last week.

Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt was the first senior EU figure to float this idea as a means of raising revenue for the Union's €99 billion annual budget."The memorandum was a compromise document," said Michel, adding that Dutch Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm refused to back the Eurotax.

His admission confirms that the grouping of European Liberal parties - to which he, Verhofstadt and Zalm belong - are divided on the idea's merits."The feeling in The Hague is that it is too early to discuss this kind of thing," said a Dutch official. "We doubt that having such a tax at the moment would make the EU very popular."

In a speech given just days before the recent Irish referendum on the Nice Treaty, Commission chief Romano Prodi came out in favour of the Eurotax. Dublin ministers are known to have been aghast at his timing, apportioning some of the blame on Prodi for the referendum's failure.

Prodi has subsequently claimed that his views were taken out of context and that he had stressed he was not seeking an increase in the tax burden shouldered by most workers.

The Benelux memorandum sets out the common ideas of the three countries on what issues EU states should focus in preparing for the next treaty-changing intergovernmental conference (IGC), scheduled to take place in 2004. It suggests that the EU should have a fully-fledged constitution, that the Commission president should be directly elected by ordinary voters and that the European Parliament should be strengthened.

Contentious calls for an EU-wide tax were omitted from the new Benelux blueprint on Europe's future because of Dutch opposition, Belgium's foreign minister Louis Michel has admitted.