Speeches

Madam President, Commissioner and colleagues, the Farm to Fork strategy certainly has many ambitious objectives. Whether we achieve these goals will depend first and foremost on whether they have the support of society and, above all, of those closest to them – our farmers. Legislative proposals must therefore be credible, workable and guarantee the prosperity of European agriculture and food. Therefore, if we are only tendentious and do not pay attention to impact studies, we will commit a number of failures and errors, as we have done in the past, for example, with cars. The only difference is that we can do without a car for a while, but without the production of European food is probably difficult. If we lose the support of farmers, it is only a matter of time before we lose the support of society as a whole. Next, I ask: Where are the commitments for the other links of the chain? Why donate less than farmers? I hope you can make it right, Commissioner.

Madam President, Commissioner, Minister, the Pandora Papers are another event in a row. We had the Panama Papers, LuxLeaks. This is another reason to continue our joint domestic efforts and especially the pressure on non-EU countries, on tax havens. We've done a lot of useful things in the last ten years. A list of non-cooperative jurisdictions has been established and the Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive has entered into force. An economic trading power as big as the European Union should consider more tools to get these countries to cooperate. LuxLeaks was published as official data and was the result of our transparency efforts. K Pandora Papers So far, we are talking only on the basis of newspaper articles and political comments. Not a single document was presented at today's hearing, but I am sure that many colleagues will already be presenting clear courts. As a member of the FISC subcommittee, I would like to stress that we are used to working with facts, not assumptions and interpretations. I would therefore like to call for all information to be provided to our committee for its further work.

Madam President, I would like to thank the rapporteur and the shadow rapporteurs for all the work they have invested in this important report. It’s my deep conviction that the idea of this report was quite excellent: to assess and analyse how we have progressed a decade after DAC1. What did we learn? That we still have some difficulty in collecting information for tariff and comprehensive analysis. I believe this is a key finding, to some extent, of course, because some of the elements are evolving through time and have entered into force relatively recently so could not be taken into consideration. I think that this is also a question about the timing of this report. I do not think this is a discouragement at all. Quite the contrary. We should continue our work and go forward making gradual progress. On a more positive note, a lot has changed since 2011 in terms of scope and in terms of the quality of the exchange of information achieved. However, technological development is going even faster and it is more than necessary to progress farther. I think the DAC revision 8 on crypto assets is more than needed and the same goes for the information for EU and non-EU located businesses.