"European Commission plans to tackle tax abuse and terrorist financing",

The European Commission has announced plans for a number of new steps to tackle tax abuse and boost tax transparency, including exchanging information on the beneficial owners of trusts, tighter oversight of tax advisors and developing a list of tax havens, in response to the issues raised by the Panama Papers investigation...The Commission said it was evident that certain tax advisors and financial intermediaries have played a central role in facilitating tax evasion, and its plans include creating effective disincentives for those that promote and enable aggressive tax planning. There is to be a public consultation by the autumn to gather feedback on the issue...As well as plans to boost tax transparency, the Commission is proposing changes to prevent the financial system from being used for funding terrorist activities. These include widening the scope of information accessible by the EU financial intelligence units so they have access to information in centralised bank and payment account registers and central data retrieval systems, which member states will have to establish to identify holders of bank and payment accounts.