Victor Negrescu: "We propose a 1% tax at European level for online gambling and betting”

The European Commission is unable to find the revenue for the 2 trillion euro budget proposed for the period 2028 and 2034, and since the taxes proposed by the institution are not to the liking of the member states, the political groups in the European Parliament and the members of the Committee on Budgets are looking for solutions. One of them was recently put forward by the Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), which was proposed by Victor Negrescu, Vice-President of the European Parliament.

Victor Negrescu stated yesterday, in Brussels, during a meeting with representatives of the Romanian media: "First of all, in order to have these European own resources or European taxes, unanimity is needed at Council level. Currently, unfortunately, there is no such unanimity for certain taxes, such as the one on tobacco, a tax that is also criticized by Romania. The main criticism coming from the member states is that these European taxes only take from national budgets and are not European taxes. Consequently, I am the author of a proposal to introduce a European tax applied to the online gambling and betting industry. If a 1% tax is applied, up to 4 billion euros could be collected annually (28 billion for the entire financial year) to finance education, youth and prevention actions. I came up with the proposal that I tried earlier; there is also the proposal to have a tax for digital services. There are a number of proposals for taxing the ETS mechanism as well, due to the fact that that there are actors who, on the stock exchange, exploit this mechanism and have huge profits that are not taxed properly at European level. What we managed to achieve in the report that the European Parliament will vote on is to say very clearly to the European Commission and the Council that, if certain taxes from those proposed are not agreed, the Commission and the Member States must commit to replacing those revenues with other revenues that they could possibly think of”.

The Vice-President of the European Parliament also stated that, in the discussions held yesterday with several fellow social-democratic ministers, the idea of refinancing the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism was advanced. According to what Victor Negrescu stated, the S&D group would like the repayment of the loan taken by the EU for the MRR to be rolled over, in order to leave more resources for the current needs of the Member States.