Dr. Aidan Regan:

I saved my presentation on the cloud so, in the absence of Internet access, I will speak from memory. I was invited to speak for five minutes, and I have five points, which is one per minute.

As someone with a certain amount of expertise in international and comparative political economy, I am asking whether Brexit paves the way for greater tax harmonisation in the European Union. The short answer is "Yes". First, the UK post-Brexit is no longer bound by those EU directives which are specifically aimed at tackling aggressive tax planning and competition and tax avoidance. This includes the anti-tax avoidance directive which is due to be implemented in 2019, with five specific clauses that each member state must implement. The UK is not bound by the directive on administrative co-operation, which is about transparency and accountability in information sharing, and it will not be bound by the new European Commission proposal on a common consolidated corporate tax base, CCCTB. It will also not be bound by EU state-aid rules. I will focus on the CCCTB and the recent proposal from the European Commission in 2016.

In the absence of a common consolidated corporate tax base and in the context of economic uncertainty, Brexit provides a short window of opportunity to take advantage of international tax law at the moment, as the EU is well aware. This can include attracting UK businesses to Ireland so that they can move over their one-stop shops here. They will no longer have access to those Single Market rules and are talking about merging UK businesses with Irish subsidiaries and moving EU parent companies in particular into Ireland in order to take advantage of transfer pricing. Those flexible arrangements are still in place and the financial industry is trying to take advantage of that. Ireland is marketing itself to attract that kind of behaviour and activity - in effect, trying to attract a certain kind of foreign direct investment, FDI.

In the medium to long term, everything depends on the EU-UK negotiations. This is my third point. The likely outcome from what we know at present is that some sort of Swiss plus-type arrangement whereby Britain will seek sectoral and industry-specific deals in those negotiations, something similar to what Switzerland currently has. What this means for Ireland is that the United Kingdom will have much greater scope to carve itself out as an aggressive corporate tax, low-tax regulatory economy in north-west Europe. This is not good for Ireland. It is the likely medium-term outcome of Brexit and the medium-term outcome of what is likely to happen in the EU in response to Brexit.

This leads to my fourth point. European integration reflects the direction of travel for the remaining member states of the EU. This is particularly the case for countries of the eurozone; we even hear talk of a eurozone parliament or treasury or the equivalent of a budgetary minister. It is well established from a political economy perspective that the Franco-German preference is very much more in favour of increased fiscal integration. The Franco-German preference is for increased tax harmonisation in particular. Only a few weeks after Brexit, the European Commission put the CCCTB proposal back on the table. Pierre Moscovici knows well how and why this is the opportunity to get that through, particularly in light of the changing Franco-German preference. Anyone who spends time in Brussels will know that the Commission is very determined to make this happen and to push it through.

The new CCCTB proposal is slightly different to the previous version. First, they have suggested that it will take place over two stages. The first will seek to agree a single set of EU rules to calculate the profits of multinationals in Europe. That is that it will seek to establish the common base for what is taxable within the European Union.