EU Overturns Agreement With US On Banking Data

Following the lead of the civil liberties committee which last week recommended dropping it (against the wishes of the US), qmaqdk writes "The EU parliament overturned the previous agreement with the US which allowed US intelligence agencies to access EU banking data."

Comments

Re:Cool, now nobody has to pay taxes.

[BitterOak]

Americans that want to avoid taxes, can now bank in Europe again. Soon the USA will follow suit and allow Europeans who do not wish to pay taxes to be shielded from Europe.

Nope. Sorry. This has nothing to do with sharing records for tax collection. This agreement allowed intelligence agencies in the U.S. to secretly access banking information for all customers, including non-U.S. citizens. The tax data sharing agreements are separate and above board and require the bank to supply data only on those required to pay income tax in the U.S. (or whichever country they share with). Virtually all countries participate in tax data sharing now, so I'm afraid you can't get out of paying your taxes simply by banking in Europe.

parliament

[Tom]

The european government consists of two elements - the commission and the parliament.

What you need to know in short:

The commission is appointed, completely undemocratic, and holds most of the power and does most of the actual activity. It also bends over backwards whenever the US wants something. It was the commission who gave away our flight data, our personal data, our Internet data and now our banking data.

The parliament is elected, is the democratic body, and has very limited powers (though they have shifted around a bit with the last reform). It isn't exactly a mecca of reason, but it more often than not stops the worst excesses of the commission.

So once again, I applaud the parliament. They're fighting uphill battles against the commission all the time.

Re:parliament

[MemoryDragon]

Actually the european parliament since the Lissabon treaties now are in place is more powerful than ever, which is a good thing, since the parliament is very democratically elected and thanks to the sheer number of fractions things like fraction alignments like it happens in some local parliaments never can happen.
For some european countries now the EU parliament is the first parliament they have in history which really acts like a parliament and not like some whore following whatever the fraction alignment tells them to do just to stay on the payroll of someone.

I would say since the Lissabon treatys the EU is closer to democracy than some EU countries are, we have the comission which can be axed by the parliament and every, absolutely every law which needs to be passed down to the countries have to be ratified and can be axed by the parliament (before it had advisory status, they could axe but in the end there were enough other ways to push the gutter down)

The problem also never was the comission, the media just blew it out of proportion, in fact some parts of the comission really do an excellent job for instance the ones which handle the anti trust issues. Important things such as the Swift treaty mostly were carried on by the council of ministers, which is represented by ministers of the single countries, exactly those persons who voted yes in those gremia and then went home to their own countries blaming the EU for what again was passed down over the EU into the single countries. Speaking of lying the members of the council of ministers were the biggest liers and basically scapegoated the EU and Comission for everything they simply did themselves! I personally stopped blaming the comission for everything because most of the evil stuff simply came over the council of ministers down the last years (mostly the interior ministers which seem to have a habit of becoming assholes as soon as they are appointed, or have been the biggest ones before even being appointed)