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Governments tried to further water down an already weak legislative proposal, Oxfam said in response to the EU finance ministers’ failure to agree on new measures against corporate tax dodging.

Renewed demands by the G77 for a UN-led body to stamp out tax havens were lauded by Oxfam today.  G77 Ministers, who met on the side-lines of the UN General Assembly in New York, re-launched their proposal for a UN-led tax body, which was blocked at a UN meeting to discuss finance for development in Addis Ababa last year.

With a growing EU gray list of tax havens, the EU must make sure countries follow up on their commitments, or else blacklist them, Oxfam said.

The OECD’s Tax Package, released in Paris today, will not stop corporate tax dodgers cheating poor countries out of billions of dollars of tax revenues

Oxfam strongly welcomes today’s leaked documents on Luxembourg’s tax haven operations revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), showing that Luxembourg granted favorable tax treatment to many multinational corporations in order for them to dodge taxes by routing their profits through the country.

The European Commission has missed yet another chance to effectively end tax havens. Today’s tax transparency proposal is not sufficiently ambitious and too limited in its scope for that task.

Under this new proposal, companies’ profits and their ability to shift them offshore will barely be affected and consequently developing countries will only see a very small increase in their corporate tax revenues. 

The US and some European countries are seeking to water down historic global tax reforms warned Oxfam today, ahead of a meeting of G20 Finance Ministers and central bank governments in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia this weekend. G20 Ministers are expected to give the green light to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) outline proposals for tax reform at the meeting on 22 and 23 February.

Following the release of data on thousands of companies and individuals registered with Appleby, the law firm at the heart of the Paradise Papers scandal, Susana Ruiz, Oxfam’s policy advisor on tax said:“The thousands of companies and individuals exposed by this leak prove tax dodging is not limited to a few bad apples – it is happening on an industrial scale.“Appleby is just one of many offshore companies helping corporations and the super-rich cheat countries out of billions in tax revenues, including an estimated $170 billion from the world’s poorest countries. “…

The European Parliament has voted in favor of legislation - as part of the vote on the Shareholder's Rights Directive - obliging large companies across all sectors to publicly declare their earnings and taxes in the locations they operate – a move Oxfam welcomes.