Mr. Philip Kermode:

There is clear political support in the European Union for the BEPS project as expressed by the ECOFIN Ministers, the Finance Ministers, but also by Heads of State. In practical terms, this is operating through a process whereby the Commission and the member states are supporting the work in the OECD and there is a process of too and fro between some of the working parties in the Commission and the Council and the OECD. Of particular importance, this is recognised also in Paris where the OECD meets, is the need to ensure that the solutions arrived at are solutions that can actually be applied by EU member states. There is a risk in starting from a blank slate that proposals are made that are simply incompatible with the treaty requirements of the EU, in which case our member states will not be able to apply them. This is something we try to avoid. In the areas I mentioned, we have particularly close contacts in the case of the discussions on the digital economy where we are very mindful of the risk of all sorts of new ideas being floated, some of which could be detrimental to the development of the digital business in the European Union as a whole. We are reading carefully from the results of expert group on that issue.