Speaking at a financial sector conference in Paris early this week, EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici advanced that an EU Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) could be in place by early 2017.
In June, 11 European nations representatives met in Luxembourg to discuss the design and future of the measure. However, disagreements on what financial instruments should be covered and at what rate led to stalled talks after Germany and France proposed the measure in 2012.
Pierre Moscovici added that “all of that (the talks) is going to wrap up during the autumn of 2015 with application at the start of 2017".
Michel Sapin, French Finance Minister, also said that due to the complexity of the tax it is unlikely to be applied before January 2016.
BETTER FINANCE supports the main objective of the European Financial Transaction Tax (FTT),“to ensure that financial institutions make a fair and substantial contribution to covering the costs of the recent crisis and to ring-fence the real economy, SMEs, households etc.”.We hope the proposal does meet this objective, and that EU citizens are not likely to bear the bulk of the FTT in lieu of financial institutions once again.
Articles on this topic: Reuters, Bloomberg