The Netherlands has for years waged a campaign to keep the tax advantages it offers multinationals despite EU efforts to phase them out, the Financieele Dagblad says on Thursday.

The Dutch position is made clear in informal minutes kept by the Code of Conduct Group, set up in 1998 to make sure EU countries did not use damaging tax rulings to compete to attract multinationals, the paper says.

The Code of Conduct Group was set up with the aim of ‘abolishing existing tax measures that constitute harmful tax competition’ and to stop members introducing new ones. Its proposals are not legally binding.

The minutes, which were released earlier this week, show the Netherlands sometimes pursued a one-country campaign to keep its attractive tax advantages and that no other country dug in its heels about proposals quite so often, the FD says.

For example, in 2008, the Dutch representative threatened to block all progress being made on the way corporations avoided tax by using differences in national tax systems.

Political issue

Two years later, the Netherlands used the pending general election to halt further progress, and, in 2011, said that the issue was a political one, not a subject for a civil service working group, the FD says.

Last week, finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem said the Netherlands is too often being used by companies to avoid tax and has so become ‘part of the problem’.

Speaking in Berlin, Dijsselbloem said: ‘Now the Netherlands holds the EU presidency, we must become part of the solution.’ The implementation of the European Commission’s proposals – based on paying tax in the country where profit is made – should be speeded up.

However, the FD points out, that European Commission proposals to make tax evasion by multinationals more difficult have been watered down under the Dutch leadership.