Mr. Paul Tang:

People find one Dutch and one carries the reputation of one's country with one. I remember distinctly a Portuguese colleague coming up to me to say that of the 20 companies listed on the stock exchange in Lisbon, 19 had a subsidiary in the Netherlands. I did not know that but she did. That is how people look at my country. This is what I tell my voters my experience is. The situations of the Netherlands and Ireland are very similar. This is the reputation Ireland has invested in and one reaps what one has sown. In Parliament, I brought forward an amendment to a report on EU tax havens. It was to point out that not only do we have tax havens within the EU, we also have them within the EU. This was highly contested. In fact, the vote was equally balanced in the Parliament, with 327 for and 327 against, except that two members voted the wrong way and corrected. I should have won that one. It means that half of the European Parliament sees the Netherlands as a tax haven, no matter whether one wins. The same is true for Ireland.