PES president Sergei Stanishev said:
“This is a moral scandal. The revealed tax evasion schemes might be on the edge of the law, but this makes them even more harmful for our societies. We can’t accept this profoundly anti-social behaviour. The teacher, the bus driver, the nurse and the policewoman all pay their fair share of tax. The better off must pay their fair share, too.”
“Like former US president Barack Obama put it, the problem is precisely that a great deal of these things are legal. They should no longer be. The Party of European Socialists has been calling for tax justice for years and we know that solving the problem will require an unprecedented political effort internationally. But we are also seeing that the the political climate to address it is more favourable than ever before. The time to act is now,” Stanishev added.
The PES commends the work of the ICIJ and underlines the importance of a free press and of functioning accountability to preserve democracy and justice. Media investigations such as the Pandora papers, the Panama papers and so on are an indispensable help in fighting tax injustice in the world.
Lately the PES expressed its strong support for the Global minimum tax as well as Public country-by-country reporting on taxes, as steps in the right direction to achieve global tax justice.
