"We, as the presiding country, will be drafting directives after June. We need to adopt several directives by the end of this year, that would commit member states to apply various measures, restrictions, and methods to make tax avoidance impossible or very hard to do," the president told BNS by phone from Brussels in Brussels.
The European Council on Wednesday focused on ways to fight tax avoidance and fraud.
According to Grybauskaitė, it was agreed that the European Commission would produce a report and concrete proposals for the June meeting of the European Council.
"The examples when Europe's largest multinational corporations pay rather low taxes, while European countries are losing the opportunity to get more taxes. There are various ways to do so. The world is divided, does not exchange information. I do not refer only to Europe. Europe can make many decision but without agreements with other countries like Lichtenstein, Switzerland, and the US on sharing information, a large part of European efforts might be wasted. It is key for this to happen at the international level," Grybauskaitė said.
The Lithuanian president added that the European Council had given a mandate for negotiations with the five small countries on cooperation on tax issues.
A meeting of the European Council on ways to prevent tax avoidance, which is estimated to cost the 27 country block EUR 1 trillion a year, started in Brussels on Wednesday. As the level of unemployment in the EU is growing and growth is stalling, leading to a rise in euroscepticism, there had been hopes that the one-day summit would result in an agreement on the EU's "crusade" against tax avoidance.
But at a meeting of EU finance ministers last week, Austria and Luxembourg refused to sign up to an EU-wide tax collection plan involving the sharing of bank records across borders.
