An investigation exposing for the first time how a high-level working group of EU member states has failed to tackle harmful tax practices in Europe.

Tax havens do not exist on sunny islands only, but also in the European Union. Some EU countries lure corporations with minimum-taxes and make other countries miss out on billions of Euros in tax revenues every year. For almost a quarter of a century, the EU has had a set of rules designed to prevent just that - and a body that should monitor compliance, the so-called Code of Conduct Group(CoCG).

This group is notorious in Brussels for its lack of transparency. Stamping working documents as top secret, and not recording member states’ negotiating positions are just a few tricks employed by the member states in the Code of Conduct Group. This level of secrecy is needed to cover up the lack of efficiency and usefulness of the CoCG as well as the active sabotage by member states of CoCG’s resolutions on corporate taxation.

More than 2.500 documents have been the basis of this project. They have been shared with EIC by Martijn Nouwen who obtained the documents using FOIA requests during his PhD research, after several years of fighting with the EU bureaucracy.

For the first time, it is now possible to trace how the EU is failing in its fight against tax competition - to the detriment of many millions of taxpayers. EIC.network will make all these documents available. We are ready to share the collection of the source documents to media and organizations doing investigative research in the public interest. Get in touch!