Free Republic

European Union nations on Thursday agreed on a sweeping policy to fight tax evasion after tiny Luxembourg dropped its reservations to new rules which render its secretive banking culture more transparent. Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel confirmed at Thursday’s summit of EU leaders “the willingness of the government to take that road,” a key step to scrap the banking secrecy for foreigners. […] The legislation proposes an EU-wide automatic exchange of data on bank deposits to allow governments to identify and pursue tax evaders with foreign accounts on home soil. Van Rompuy said it would “close down loopholes, promote automatic...

Germany’s highest court ruled on Tuesday that the European bailout fund, the ESM, was in line with the country’s constitution, throwing out numerous objections by euroskeptics. Confirming a preliminary ruling dating from September 2012, the Federal Constitutional Court said it saw no obstacles to Germany taking part in the €500-billion European Stability Mechanism, set up to bail out troubled countries and their banks. Nevertheless, in the ruling, presiding judge Andreas Voßkuhle insisted that it must be “the Bundestag [lower house of parliament] which retains sole responsibility over Germany’s public income and spending, even with regard to its international and European...

Ireland’s economy suffered a shock decline in the final months of 2013, posting negative growth for the year and casting a pall over the country’s full return to the financial markets. Data from the country’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) on Thursday (13 March) indicated that its gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 2.3 percent in the fourth quarter, turning a year that had been expected to yield modest growth into a 0.3 percent recession for the year as a whole. […] Analysts attributed the decline to the so-called pharmaceutical patent cliff, with a sharp drop-off in revenue from pharmaceutical sales...

Less than a hundred days before the European Parliament elections, French citizens are less and less attracted by the EU project, according to the latest opinion polls, with a quarter now in favor of quitting the eurozone and reintroducing the franc, EurActiv France reports. 42% of surveyed French citizens think that the country’s EU membership is a good thing, a six-point decrease compared to April 2012, according to the survey by OpinionWay for TV news channel LCI and Le Figaro newspaper. […] Another fundamental EU policy, the free movement of persons, is also increasingly disliked by the French. A survey...

London’s financial services center would lose access to the wider European Union should Britain quit the bloc, the EU’s justice chief said on Monday, warning that such a move would reduce its status to that of an offshore center. Viviane Reding’s blunt comments come amid a heated debate in Britain over its future in the 28-country European Union and will reinforce fears in the City of London that a departure from the EU will hurt its position as a global financial capital. “The City would most definitely lose its unhindered access to the (EU’s) single market in the case of...

Germany's Constitutional Court ruling last Friday marks a significant escalation in efforts to rein in the European Central Bank. The ruling's message? Either the European Court of Justice has to stop bond purchases or German justices will. It is also a clear indication that Germany's highest court is extremely skeptical of the ECB. Draghi's 2012 announcement that the ECB would embark on unlimited sovereign bond purchases from ailing euro-zone member states, the court found, is incompatible with European law. The ruling notes that OMT "exceeds the mandate" of the ECB and "encroaches on the responsibility of the member states for...

Corruption across the EU bloc is costing taxpayers billions, as member states fail to tackle the problem head on, according to the European Commission. The Brussels executive on Monday (3 February) published its first ever bi-annual anti-corruption report on each of the 28 EU countries, citing public procurement and obscure political party financing as among the most pervasive problems. […] Public procurement contracts, equivalent to one-fifth of the total EU economy, are said to be the worst affected with up to a quarter of their value lost to corrupt practices. …

Two of the largest banks in northern Europe have announced they will boycott Israeli banks because they operate in “occupied territories”, the Walla! Hebrew-language news website reported on Saturday. The two banks in question are the Swedish Nordea Bank, which is the largest bank in Scandinavia, and the Norwegian Danske Bank, which is the largest bank in Denmark. […] The Walla! report comes on the same day that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry threatened Israel that a failure in the peace talks would lead to global boycotts and delegitimization of the Jewish state. …

Germany’s constitutional court is expected to rule this spring on the legality of the European Central Bank’s bond purchases, a scheme that has eased the eurozone crisis by calming markets. Udo Di Fabio, who served as constitutional judge between 1999-2011, told an audience at the Berlin-based Stiftung fur Familienunterhmen on Wednesday (29 January) that the court is “deliberating at the moment if the ECB can buy bonds at all.” According to EU laws, the ECB is prohibited from direct government funding, meaning direct bond purchases when a national government tries to sell debt on the markets. But in the past...

Germany’s finance minister said on Monday he was open to the creation of a separate European parliament for countries using the euro, a step that could deepen divisions within the European Union. Wolfgang Schäuble’s comments, made during a visit to Brussels, challenge the very foundations of the European Union, where lawmaking for all 28 nations is by the bloc’s current parliament. Splitting that body, critics believe, would represent a dismantling of one of Europe’s biggest symbols of unity. But Schäuble said a separate parliament for the 18 countries in the eurozone would allow the smaller group to integrate more closely....

Trust in national and European institutions has hit a record-low in France, according to a recent poll, leading to a feeling of “gloom” among a growing number of citizens, and perhaps even a rise in support for the reinstatement of the death penalty, EurActiv France reports. […] Trust in others is also falling, underlining a lack of confidence in society which is symptomatic of a broader phenomenon: only 24% of the French think that others can be trusted. The French are highly skeptical of all those who are supposed to represent them, whether politicians, journalists, analysts or trade unions. […]...

Three prominent political analysts spoke with EurActiv.de on the 51st anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, evaluating the Franco-German partnership in 2014 and challenges for the years ahead. Frank Baasner, director at the Franco-German Institute in Ludwigsburg (Deutsch-Französisches Institut Ludwigsburg), said the time had come for renewed reflection, fifty-one years after the Élysée Treaty was signed. 2014 would be a historical year, Baasner said, with Germany, France and the rest of the EU putting the bloc to the test as they tackle the still unfinished eurozone crisis and military intervention in Africa. […] The assessment of prescribing a uniquely French solution...

The number of banks in the eurozone fell by almost 4 percent in 2013, according to data published Tuesday (21 January) by the European Central Bank. There were 6,790 monetary financial institutions (MFIs) based in the euro area at the start of 2014, compared with 7,059 one year ago, a 3.8 percent reduction. Crisis countries Cyprus and Greece saw the largest reductions, losing 26 percent and 17 percent of their financial sector firms over the past year. Greece now has just 62 financial institutions, while Cyprus’ sector has fallen from 409 firms when it joined the EU in 2004 to...

Germany's blowback against gold manipulation is accelerating. Following yesterday's report that Bafin took a hard line against precious metals manipulation, after its president Eike Koenig said possible manipulation of precious metals "is worse than the Libor-rigging scandal", today the response has trickled down to Germany and Europe's largest bank, Deutsche Bank, which announced that it would withdraw from the appropriately named gold and silver price "fixing", as European regulators investigate suspected manipulation of precious metals prices by banks. As a reminder, Deutsche is one of five banks involved in the twice-daily gold fix for global price setting and said it...

The “troika” of international lenders, which sets the terms of eurozone bailouts with little or no democratic oversight, should be replaced by an EU system which is accountable to the European Parliament, MEPs say. “All European instruments that are not based on EU law are provisional. EU instruments should be based on the community method, with the European Parliament acting as democratic legitimator and control body,” Austrian center-right deputy Othmar Karas told press in Strasbourg on Wednesday (15 January). Karas is drafting a report together with a French Socialist colleague, Liem Hoang-Ngoc, on the work of the troika. The name...

Britain told its European Union partners on Wednesday the EU’s treaties were “not fit for purpose” and there must be reform or it would quit the bloc. In the latest blast of euroskepticism from Conservatives in Britain’s coalition government, finance minister George Osborne said EU treaties had to be changed to protect member states like his own that don’t use the euro. The comments, made at a conference in London on reform of the 28-nation EU, are unlikely to be embraced by integrationists in Brussels, who want Britain to remain in the bloc but have become irritated by its demands...

The UK parliament should have the right to throw out EU laws, according to a letter from Conservative MPs to Prime Minister David Cameron. In the letter, made public on Sunday (12 January), 95 Conservatives (out of a total of 225) stated that the House of Commons should be able to block new EU legislation and repeal existing measures that threaten Britain’s “national interests”. A national parliament veto power would allow the UK to “recover control over our borders, to lift EU burdens on business, to regain control over energy policy and to disapply the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights”....

A campaign for the European Union to become a “United States of Europe” will be the “best weapon against the Euroskeptics”, one of Brussels’ most senior officials has said. Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission and the longest serving Brussels commissioner, has called for “a true political union” to be put on the agenda for EU elections this spring. “We need to build a United States of Europe with the Commission as government and two chambers—the European Parliament and a ‘Senate’ of Member States,” she said. Mrs. Reding’s vision, which is shared by many in the European institutions,...

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned on Thursday that the economic crisis in Europe could still prove “dangerous” for the EU by encouraging political forces hostile to the bloc. Steinmeier also dismissed euroskeptics, who have gained political ground over the EU debt crisis, as “brainless”. “I am concerned about the situation in our union,” he told Ta Nea daily ahead of visit to Greece. “The crisis in public finances is not over yet… the economic crisis could activate centrifugal political forces that could prove dangerous to the European Union as a whole.” …

While the eurozone crisis in 2013 lingered in most countries, Germany seemed to be doing better than ever. It had low unemployment, high productivity and exports so strong that the European Commission asked it to do more to help ailing periphery countries in the single currency bloc. Chancellor Angela Merkel—the most powerful leader in Europe—was elected once again and took up a third mandate in a coalition government with the Social Democrats. […] The famous question—“Who do I call when I want to talk Europe?”—has no answer. The EU is too complicated. But 2013 showed that calling Berlin (or bugging...