US Diplomacy At Work: Top U.S. Diplomat says to Europe: "Fuck The EU"

The United States’ top diplomat for European affairs appears to have been caught on tape saying “fuck the EU” in a leaked phone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

The Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper in Ukraine, published the tape on Thursday. The recording’s veracity has not been independently verified.

The phone call appears to show Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland discussing the political situation in Ukraine with a man who sounds to be Ambassador Geoff Pyatt and weighing the merits of different opposition leaders.

A woman who sounds like Nuland says, “I don’t think it’s a good idea” for opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko to be given a role in the government. She appears to favor the idea of having Arseniy Yatseniuk, another opposition leader, as the new prime minister, saying he has “the economic experience, the governing experience.”

She then tells a man who sounds like Pyatt that the United Nations agreed to send someone to help “glue” the deal. “And you know, fuck the EU,” Nuland says. “Exactly,” Pyatt says.

“The EU is engaged in helping the people of Ukraine through the current political crisis. We don’t comment on alleged leaked telephone conversations,” Maja Kocijancic, a spokesperson for EU foreign policy chief Cathy Ashton, told BuzzFeed.

Note EU-Digest: as the saying goes "with friends like this who needs any enemies"

Read more: Top U.S. Diplomat For Europe: "Fuck The EU"

Tax Evasion: France's Hollande slams Internet giants including Google on tax evasion

President Francois Hollande said Thursday that France would not continue to tolerate the tax optimisation strategies used by multinational Internet giants like Google.

"This is not acceptable and that is why, at both the European and the global level, we must ensure that tax optimisation... can be called into question," Hollande said on a visit to the offices of Internet sales company vente-privee.com in the Paris suburbs.

His comments follow reports that France is seeking one billion euros ($1.36 billion) in tax from Google over its fiscal strategies.

"Everyone must be in the same competitive situation, including on the fiscal level," Hollande said.

"When I go to the United States in a few days, we have agreed with President (Barack) Obama to make this effort on tax harmonisation," he said.

Hollande is making a state visit to the United States from February 10 to 12, during which he will meet with major tech firms including Google, Facebook and Twitter in Silicon Valley.

Magazine Le Point reported on Tuesday that Paris has decided to make the claim against Google, though neither the company nor tax authorities would confirm it.

France is one of a growing number of nations to pursue more aggressively what they see as abuse of tax and accounting rules that allows some multinational companies to pay less tax.

President Francois Hollande said Thursday that France would not continue to tolerate the tax optimisation strategies used by multinational Internet giants like Google.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-02-france-hollande-slams-internet-giants.html#jCp

Read more: France's Hollande slams Internet giants on tax

The Netherlands - NSA Spying: Home affairs minister Plasterk under fire over security service phone taps

Ronald Plasterkerk and the NSA

Dutch Home affairs minister Ronald Plasterk and defence minister Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert were summoned by the prime minister on Wednesday night to explain the confusion over exactly who gathered information on 1.8 million phone calls and text messages.

The ministers told parliament yesterday the Dutch, not the American, secret services were responsible for monitoring the phone calls, and that the information had then been shared with the US authorities.

Parliament is due to debate the latest information next week. Opposition MPs want to know if Plasterk deliberately misinformed parliament last year when he stated NSA was behind the information gathering.

Plasterk said: 'The details were collected in the interest of counter-terrorism activities and military operations abroad,’ the briefing stated. The information was then ‘shared with the US’.

Note EU-Digest: The question that needs to be asked in the Dutch Parliament is - "who requested the info in the first place and if it was the NSA why were Dutch citizen privacy rights breached and why was this information given so freely to this US spy agency ? "

Read more: DutchNews.nl - Home affairs minister under fire over security service phone taps

Tourist Visas: EU to Eliminate Visa Requirement for Colombians, Peruvians

The European Union reached an accord to eliminate the visa requirement for brief stays by Colombians and Peruvians, the EU delegation in Bogota said Tuesday.

The agreement is a “verbal political decision” that was reached in Strasbourg by the European Parliament, Council and Commission, and must be ratified by the Permanent Representatives Committee, after which the official announcement will be made in Brussels on Wednesday.

“The decision adopted today ratifies the political will of the EU to eliminate the visa requirement for Colombians and gives a green light to beginning the legislative process that will allow the measure to be implemented in the near future,” the bloc’s ambassador to Colombia, Maria Antonia van Gool, said in a communique.

The elimination of the visa requirement for Colombians and Peruvians to visit the Schengen Area, made up of 26 European countries, was proposed last August by Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

The date when the decision will take effect has not yet been decided.

Read more: Latin American Herald Tribune - EU to Eliminate Visa Requirement for Colombians, Peruvians

Tax Evasion: IBM dodged taxes by fictitiously moving employees to the Netherlands - by Tim Fernholz

IBM - the IT services company, under pressure to meet a high earnings forecast, has turned to the ever-malleable tax code for a boost to its earnings. That has some pretty surprising consequences, as Alex Barinka and Jesse Drucker report for Bloomberg: The company is driving more income through a subsidiary in the Netherlands. In 2008, the subsidiary, IBM International Group BV, reported just three employees, but at the end of 2012, it reported 205,000—almost half of the company’s worldwide staff of 430,000 workers.

Of course, we’d be hearing about a Dutch property bubble if those 205,000 people actually lived in the Netherlands. In fact, just 2% of them do. The rest are scattered around the world. For tax purposes, measures like these saved the company $6.5 billion from 2010 to 2012. 

In 2013, the company paid a 15.6% overall global tax rate, which it attributed to a “more favorable [than] expected geographic mix” of revenues (auditor jokes are funny). That will have added to the $44 billion of untaxed cash the company had accumulated overseas by the end of 2012, though we don’t yet know by how much.

Public-policy concerns aside, what worries analysts, of course, is a company on a cost-cutting mission running out of costs to cut. When it’s doing so much of that through tax avoidance, it inevitably raises questions about how well the primary business is going. 

Read more: IBM saved its earnings by moving almost half its employees to the Netherlands - Quartz

Artificial Food Coloring: Caramel Coloring in Soda could be cancer causing

Soft Drinks - Sodas

Caramel color, added to many soft drinks and some foods to turn them brown, may sound harmless, even appetizing. But in no way does it resemble real caramel. Some types of this artificial coloring contain a potentially carcinogenic chemical called 4-methylimidazole (4-MeI). Under California’s Proposition 65 law, any food or beverage sold in the state that exposes consumers to more than 29 micrograms of 4-MeI per day is supposed to carry a health-warning label.

In recent Consumer Reports’ tests, each of the 12-ounce samples of Pepsi One and Malta Goya had more than 29 micrograms per can or bottle. While we cannot say that this violates California's Prop 65, we believe that these levels are too high, and we have asked the California Attorney General to investigate.

Caramel color is the single most used food coloring in the world, according to a 2013 report from market research firms Mintel and Leatherhead Food Research. “There’s no reason why consumers should be exposed to an avoidable and unnecessary risk that can stem from coloring food brown,” says Urvashi Rangan, Ph.D., toxicologist and executive director of Consumer Reports’ Food Safety & Sustainability Center. “Manufacturers have lower 4-MeI alternatives available to them. Ideally there would be no 4-MeI in food.”

In 2007, a US federal government study concluded that 4-MeI caused cancer in mice and the International Agency for Research on Cancer determined the chemical to be “possibly carcinogenic to humans” in 2011.

There’s no US federal limit for levels of 4-MeI in foods and beverages, but as of January 7, 2012 California requires manufacturers to label a product sold in the state with a cancer warning if it exposes consumers to more than 29 micrograms of 4-MeI per day. In this case, the exposure comes from consumption.

The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment used 29 micrograms as the cut off point because that’s the level they determined poses a one in 100,000 risk of cancer—that is, no more than one excess cancer case per 100,000 people who are exposed to that amount daily for a lifetime.

Read more: Caramel Coloring in Soda | Artificial Food Coloring | 4-MeI - Consumer Reports

EU Lobbyist Register: Campaigners disappointed by new EU lobbying text - by Dave Keating

A draft agreement on changes to the combined European Parliament and European Commission lobbyist register, endorsed by members of the Parliament's bureau last week, has been branded “hugely disappointing” by transparency campaigners.

The draft text endorsed by the bureau on 13 January has not yet been published. But a leaked draft seen by European Voice provides more details into the results of a review process concluded in December.

The proposed text would not make it mandatory for people and entities lobbying the parliament to sign the register. But it says that people who have signed the register should benefit from better access to Parliament premises.

Other incentives could include “authorisation to organise or co-host events on its premises, facilitated transmission of information including specific mailing lists [or] participation as speakers in committee hearings.”

Transparency campaign group ALTER-EU criticised the proposal, which will be put to a vote by the Parliament's constitutional affairs committee in the coming weeks. The group will release a scorecard today (27 January) assessing the text. Out of the ten ALTER-EU recommendations for reform, five will be assessed as “no progress made” and a further three as “some improvement, more to do”.

“Our scorecard shows that there are only a handful of proposed changes which show improvement,” said Max Bank of LobbyControl, a member of the ALTER-EU steering committee. “Meanwhile it seems unlikely that many of the currently unregistered organisations and law firms will be incentivised to now join.”

The group also criticised the lack of transparency in the review process. Apart from two press releases by the Parliament and the Commission in December, no other documents have been published.

Read more: Campaigners disappointed by new EU lobbying text | European Voice