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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

> The parliament identified the most urgent measures the EU needs to take to close loopholes that currently allow for tax avoidance, money laundering and tax evasion on a massive scale.

This is a very important step to improve Europe economy. The more corrupt is a government the more difficult is for business to thrive. Tax evasion gives an economic advantage to law breakers that cheat instead of competing in an open market to earn that money.

> Two thirds of the shell companies in the Pandora Papers are located in the British Virgin Islands, which has never featured on the EU blacklist and still are not included in the list.

The Pandora Papers are a strong argument to increase vigilance over the activity in such countries. That countries are helping to steal EU citizens money for a part of the loot.

I hope that UK and USA help to stop crime and return citizens what is theirs money.

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Do you live in Europe? The last thing we need is more regulation. I can almost guarantee that whatever law they pass is only going to make it harder for those of us actually trying to start up businesses here.

It’s not an either/or situation. We both need more regulation and harmonisation regarding tax evasion and tax dodging both inside and outside the EU and less regulation when it comes to starting businesses.

No we do not. Tax harmonization is being aggressively pushed by certain member states for their own benefit and to the detriment of other, less developed member states.

That’s completely false. The EU budgets itself is extremely favorable to less developed member states even when these states should be excluded from the union like Hungary. The current tax issues favor countries which are already rich like Luxembourg and the Netherlands at the expense of countries which are actually producing values in Europe. It has nothing to do with the eastern countries.

EU cohesion funds and other forms of block-wide handouts are not a substitute for functioning and competitive economies. The ability to compete on taxes is absolutely critical for these small countries to attract business and retain their human capital (which would otherwise just leave for developed western-European countries).

> ability to compete on taxes

To steal from other EU members is no competition it's just unethical. Small countries can live just by cashing a small part of the money that is rightly owned by countries with more population. That needs to be fixed.

Competing for foreign investment is not stealing. What you're implying is that small countries should know their place, not rock the boat too much and above all else, never dare compete with bigger countries...or else. Needless to say, such a stance is antithetical to the very foundations of the European Union. The free movement of capital, labor and goods & services is a whole package - you cannot pick the parts you like and disregard the parts you don't because they're not to your advantage.

That’s a misrepresentation of the situation. Developing EU countries are not currently and can’t compete for foreign investments with the block heavy weights. They have neither the infrastructure nor the human capital to do that. The bigger European countries are the one heavily investing in the developing countries for manufacturing.

Also obviously the EU can put in place any kind of controls it deems necessary on the common market. It’s sovereign in this matter after all and tax dumping is mostly helping foreign-based multinational corporations.

I almost guarantee that you never tried to start a business here in the last ten years.

I used to work for a cloud provider that helped bootstrap business projects, research and start-ups, first in france then in the later years, all over europe.

Do you know how long it took to start a service company in France in 2018? Half a day. And the government own service that help a lot with online identity and paper filling wasn't even online yet, i'm pretty sure that if i want to start a limited company, and make this company employ myself as a freelancer/self-employed (don't know the exact translation), i'd be able to do it in a day.

This is because the speed of starting a company is one of the major metrics in the Doing Business IMF ranking. Not all is rose, though. A large part if the population in France can not start a business because of unsufficient qualifications.

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