Minds

The EU has moved to force multinational companies to publish a breakdown of the tax they pay in each of the bloc’s member states and in tax havens such as Seychelles, piling pressure on the UK government to follow suit.

Country-by-country reporting is designed to shine a light on how some of the world’s biggest companies – such as Apple, Facebook and Google – avoid paying an estimated $500bn (£358bn) a year in taxes by shifting their profits from higher-tax countries such as the UK, France and Germany to zero-tax or low-tax jurisdictions including Ireland, Luxembourg and Malta.

A majority of EU countries backed legislation at a meeting of ministers on Thursday, in what campaigners said was a “landmark” moment, five years after the regulation was first proposed.

Negotiations will now open with the European parliament, which wants to broaden the scope of the regulation. MEPs want multinationals to make public their profits and tax paid in any country, rather than just member states or a blacklist of EU tax havens, as the price for operating in the bloc.

The decision by the member states to move forward with the proposal, first tabled by the European commission after the 2014 LuxLeaks scandal exposed the sweetheart deals being offered by Luxembourg, was celebrated by senior MEPs who have campaigned for reform.

The Spanish matador Miguel Ángel Perera was delighted by the manner in which he fought and dispatched a four-year-old, 539kg bull by the name of Curioso in June 2014.

But, despite being awarded both of Curioso’s ears for his performance in the bullring in the south-western city of Badajoz, Perera was keen for greater recognition of his work that day – namely that it be enshrined in copyright as a work of art.

If bullfighting was an art, his lawyers argued, then a bullfighter’s performance could be registered as an original artistic creation.

On Thursday, however, Spain’s supreme court rejected his request, ruling that a bullfighter’s work could not be registered as intellectual property on the grounds that it was hard to identify it as a concrete example of artistic creation.

One of three men accused of planting and detonating the car bomb that killed the anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 has pleaded guilty to the crime and been sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Vincent Muscat is the first person to be convicted of the killing, which has embroiled Malta’s ruling Labour party in political scandal and led to the resignation of its prime minister in late 2019.

In a day of dramatic developments, police made three new arrests, apprehending the brothers Adrian and Robert Agius, and their associate Jamie Vella, on suspicion of having supplied the bomb used to murder Caruana Galizia.

News of the arrests emerged just after Muscat’s lawyer announced in court that his client was ready to change his plea to guilty.

Muscat, who is believed by police to have acted as a hitman in a contract to kill the journalist, is reported to have negotiated a more lenient sentence in exchange for supplying state prosecutors with information on others involved. He has also been granted a presidential pardon to help shed light on an entirely separate case – the 2015 murder of a lawyer, Carmel Chircop.

Malta’s prime minister, Robert Abela, and his cabinet approved the request for Muscat’s pardon on Monday. Chircop died aged 51, killed by gunmen on his way to work. The case has never been solved.

Brussels has put six EU member states on notice that their tight Covid border restrictions, including exit and entry bans, should be lifted over fears of a wider breakdown in the bloc’s free movement of people and goods.

Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary and Sweden have been given 10 days to respond to the European commission’s concerns that they have breached commonly agreed coronavirus guidelines.

Restrictions imposed by Germany at its border with the Austrian Tirol region have been a particular cause of tension in recent weeks, with the German ambassador in Vienna summoned to justify the “unnecessary measures that do more harm than good”.

There are concerns in Germany, however, that the country could be heading into a third wave of infection, with the number of cases per 100,000 residents in the last seven days at 60.5 – up from 55-57 the previous week.

The commission published its guidelines in January recommending EU member states keep open their borders and only “strongly discourage” non-essential travel, with the option of imposing testing and quarantine requirements on travellers from areas with high levels of infection.

The commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, a former German minister, has said she is determined to avoid a repeat of the early months of the pandemic when a series of unilateral decisions caused chaos at the borders and threatened supply chains.

But in recent weeks, stricter controls have been applied by the six countries targeted by the EU’s executive branch, in what a commission spokesman said presented a clear risk to the functioning of the single market in goods and people.

The contentious new border controls include a broad ban on non-essential travel imposed by the governments of Belgium and Sweden and the selective entry restrictions enforced by the German government on traffic from Austria’s Tirol region, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Currently only German citizens, foreign residents and essential workers are allowed to cross the border.

On Tuesday, Austria’s chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, tweeted a call for “common standards for travel and the transport of goods within the EU to ensure the functioning of the single market”.

“It is a necessity to go back to a coordinated approach to all the measures taken in relations with the free movement of people and goods in the European Union,” the EU commissioner for justice, Didier Reynders, a former Belgian minister, said.

Germany’s Europe minister, Michael Roth, insisted his government needed to act due to its exposure as “a transit country in the middle of the European Union”.

He said: “I reject the accusation that we have not complied with EU law … These measures obviously put a massive strain on border regions, commuters and the transport of goods and the single market, but the protection of our citizens is paramount.”

The restrictions on the German-Austrian border were enforced earlier this month over concern at the high incidence in the Czech Republic and Tirol of the newer more infectious coronavirus variant first identified in the UK.

A commission spokesman said: “We trust that we will find solutions with member states concerns without having to revert to legal steps, which can be lengthy. So, member states have now 10 days to reply and we will then take it from there.”

Russians responsible for the “arrest, sentencing and persecution” of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny will be hit by EU sanctions in the first use of the bloc’s so-called Magnitsky act.

Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, said the 27 member states had agreed to impose restrictive measures under powers adopted earlier to target people behind human rights abuses.

The names of those involved are yet to be made public, but Borrell said he did not expect it to take longer than a week for formal approval of the freezing of assets and imposition of travel bans.

Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister who was widely perceived as being humiliated during a press conference with his Russian counterpart in Moscow earlier this month, said the Kremlin had rejected a diplomatic way out of the crisis.

Following a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday, Borrell said there had been agreement that Russia was becoming an authoritarian state that was “driving away from Europe”.

He said: “In response to events around the situation of Mr Navalny we reached a political agreement to impose restrictive measures against those responsible for his arrest, and sentencing and persecution, and in doing that, for the first time ever, we will make use of the European Union global human rights regime to this end.”

Navalny’s two-and-a-half-year prison sentence for violating the terms of his parole – while recovering in Germany from an attempted assassination attempt by individuals identified as FSB operatives – was confirmed by a Russian appeal court on Friday.

French police say they will probably have to wait until spring to continue the search for a British hiker who went missing late last year in the Pyrenees.

Esther Dingley, 37, had been walking alone in the mountains near the border between Spain and France and was last seen on 22 November.

French police captain Jean Marc Bordinaro told the Times “all possible investigations” in French territory had been carried out “without any result”.

He said: “We have no indication permitting us to confirm the presence of Esther Dingley in France since she was seen for the last time on the Spanish side of the Pic de Sauvegarde. We’ll probably have to wait till spring to undertake more searches.”

Plans to mark the 800th anniversary of Burgos’s magnificent gothic cathedral with three enormous new bronze doors have ushered in an unholy row, with Unesco advising against the project and critics attacking the €1.2m portals as an “artistic outrage”.

Cathedral authorities in the northern Spanish city say the new doors, designed by the renowned, award-winning artist Antonio López, are a work of contemporary art that will complement “a monument already rendered in five artistic styles that are the fruit of each stage of its eight centuries”. They also point out that the current wooden doors are old and in a poor state of repair.

But not everyone is enamoured of the new doors, which show God the Father, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus as a young child.

Unesco’s World Heritage Centre, acting on a report by the Spanish branch of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (Icomos), has recommended against installing the bronze doors.

Icomos points out that Burgos Cathedral’s status as a world heritage site means the cathedral authorities will need to “accept the consequences that could result from failing to live up to their commitments to safeguard the cathedral as a place of outstanding universal value”.

More than 31,000 people have signed an angry petition attacking the new doors as “an eyesore however you look at them” and claiming “no anniversary warrants such ill treatment of our heritage”.

The petition questions whether the new doors are the best use of such a large sum of money, adding: “Given the queues of hungry people we’re seeing, and the fact that the cathedral doesn’t even have central heating – which is no laughing matter in Burgos – why is the archbishopric spending €1.2m on this?”

Diligent research, a counterfeiting expert, an identical box and nerves as hard as the diamonds they stole helped a gang of audacious jewel thieves and con artists scam their way across Europe, pocketing stones worth almost €20m (£17m) and swindling a classic car collector out of €185,ooo.

But their sleight-of-hand skills and bundles of fake banknotes eventually caught the attention of police on both sides of the Pyrenees, and eight people were arrested at the end of December following a year-long joint investigation by Spanish and French police.

According to Spain’s Policía Nacional force, the eight people, who were arrested in the Paris suburb of Bondy, ran a so-called rip-deal scam, posing as wealthy buyers and using fake money to con their victims.

Ford has pledged that all of its cars on sale in Europe will be electric by 2030, in the latest move by the world’s biggest auto manufacturers to set out plans to move away from polluting internal combustion engines before looming bans on fossil-fuel vehicles across the world.

The US car giant said on Wednesday that it was going “all in” on electric vehicles and would invest $1bn (£720m) converting a vehicle assembly plant in Cologne, Germany, to become its first electric vehicle facility in Europe. It said the first all-electric cars would start rolling off the production line there in 2023.

Ford promised that all of its passenger cars in Europe would be “zero-emissions capable all-electric or plug-in hybrid” by mid-2026, before ramping up its ambitions to be “completely all-electric by 2030”.

For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown, what’s one more book? French publisher Gallimard has announced that it will be releasing a never-before-published work by the great French writer: Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, or The Seventy-Five Pages, on 18 March.

The texts in The Seventy-Five Pages were written in 1908, around the time Proust began working on In Search of Lost Time, which was published between 1913 and 1927. The papers were part of a collection of documents held by the late publisher Bernard de Fallois, who died in 2018. During his lifetime, De Fallois oversaw the posthumous publication of several Proust works including Jean Santeuil, Proust’s abandoned first novel from the 1890s.