PARIS: The European Union will take measures to tax US tech giants if the international community doesn’t agree to a new system early next year, a senior official said Tuesday.

“Last month, the Commission launched a public consultation on how to tax the digital economy,” said Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s competition commissioner, at a conference organised by the French economy ministry in Paris.

She said the EU would use the results of the consultation in negotiations being held under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the 35-nation club of industrialised nations.

But Vestager warned that: “if there’s no international answer to this issue by spring next year, we’ll produce our own proposal for new EU rules to make sure digital companies are taxed fairly.”

With public coffers still strained years after the worst of the debt crisis, EU leaders have agreed to tackle the question, spurred on by French President Emmanuel Macron who has slammed the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple as the “freeloaders of the modern world”.

Published in Dawn, November 22nd, 2017