The European Union should fund its planned budget deficit via fines levvied against big tech, France is set to argue this week.
At an EU ministerial meeting in Paris on Wednesday, French government representative Benjamin Haddad is reportedly set to argue that the bloc should use a recent €4.6 billion fine levied against Google to help pad its budget.
Haddad, who serves as President Emmanuel Macron’s Europe minister, is set to bring the proposal to EU leaders amid tense discussions on how to expand Brussels’ piggybank without putting pressure on national economies.
“The real debate is whether the European Commission will use this revenue to fund additional spending or take the opportunity to reduce member countries’ contributions,” the minister reportedly added.
The minister will also reportedly propose implementing EU-wide taxes on mostly-American big tech firms as another way of boosting income, a proposal that has already been given the green light by the European Parliament.
France is said to have already received some support for these proposals.
Haddad, having first aired the idea of using big tech fines to help Brussels expand its budget last month, is now said to have the support of some of the “Friends of Cohesion” countries, which are largely in favour of EU regulatory expansion.
Spain, led by embattled Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, is believed to be one of them, with the country’s left-wing government issuing a statement saying that they want more discussions of how to build up the “revenue side” of Europe’s forthcoming budget.
Both countries appear to be increasingly gunning for Ireland amid ongoing intra-EU tensions over Dublin’s presidency of the European Council.
A proposal for the next seven-year EU budget published by the government last Saturday in its capacity as president was widely derided by the European Parliament, European Commission, and many member states for being fiscally irresponsible while failing to provide enough investment into local industry.
Macron’s administration is also increasingly putting EU focus on Ireland’s close relationship with US tech firms, with Paris’ finance minister saying that the tax gathered by Dublin through these companies should be redistributed by Brussels.
“At the moment, for obvious reasons, Ireland is getting a big share of the global taxation because most of the digital global companies have got their headquarters in Ireland,” Minister Roland Lescure said in September.
“I think the redistribution of the taxes and the receipts that come out of the digital services that are making their income on the whole of Europe has to be fairly distributed.”