The European Parliament meets later on Thursday (11 April) for its second-last plenary session — but this time with a special guest waiting outside its Brussels building.
While MEPs are expected to debate and vote on various energy market pieces of legislation, Oxfam, together with Avaaz and WeMove Europe, will land an inflatable private jet outside the parliament building to call on EU lawmakers to take wider action against Europe’s richest and biggest polluters.
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“Governments can no longer excuse their ‘lack of funds’ for failing to fight the climate crisis and end poverty. The money they need is in the pockets of the super-rich,” said Chiara Putaturo, Oxfam’s EU tax expert.
The NGO calculates that EU governments are losing €33m every hour in unpaid taxes from Europe’s super-rich, amounting to €286.5bn a year.
The estimates are based on what a European wealth tax of between two and five percent could raise each year for the EU coffers. Money that could pay for almost 40 percent of the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund and which is approximately equivalent to last year’s GDP of Finland (€277.625bn), they note.
Another study by the Greens in the European parliament estimates that €59.5bn a year is lost by not tackling tax avoidance by the super-rich in tax havens such as Bermuda or the Cayman Islands.
“On their luxurious private jets, a privileged few thrive while the bills for the many stack higher and higher and the planet burns,” Putaturo said.
Financial wealth in Europe is also concentrated in the hands of a few, with the richest one percent holding 47 percent of the total — and their wealth is only growing.
Between 2020 and November 2023 alone, the wealth of billionaires in the EU (excluding Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta and Slovenia) increased from €1.44 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms to €1.92 trillion.
Moreover, the wealthiest in Europe are also the biggest polluters: a person in the richest one percent emits on average 14 times more carbon emissions than a person in the bottom 50 percent, the NGO says.
In a letter to European Council president Charles Michel on Monday, Oxfam executive director Amitabh Behar asked the member states to include progressive taxation in the EU’s strategic agenda for the upcoming five years.
“As current resources for development aid, humanitarian needs and climate challenges are not sufficient, additional revenues must be collected where excessive fortune has accumulated,” he wrote.
By October, a European citizens’ initiative will try to collect one million signatures to call on the EU to introduce a wealth tax on the very rich to fund a green and social transition — although even if they succeed, there is no guarantee that the EU Commission will respond with a legislative proposal.
