Enlarge image
Tax expert Nouwen
Photo: Andreas Chudowski / DER SPIEGEL
There were moments when I wished Martijn Nouwen hadn't called me that day in July and said he had something for me.
I met the Dutch scientist in 2016 while researching the Luxembourg Leaks tax scandal.
At that time he managed to get secret documents from the so-called group code of conduct of the EU.
In this body, the EU states coordinate their rules on corporate taxation - with the aim of not undercutting each other with ever lower tariffs in the competition for the settlement of large corporations.
But to this day, global corporations such as Amazon, Google or Apple pay ridiculously low taxes on their billions in profits.
In July, Nouwen offered me around 2,500 documents from the Code of Conduct group, confidential meeting minutes, table documents, and emails that he had evaluated for his doctoral thesis.
They promised a unique look into the engine room in which the EU states are fighting for billions of euros and national autonomy in tax matters.
The federal government is also preventing more transparency
But it quickly became clear that the papers would not divulge their secrets without a fight.
The texts consisted of the worst technical jargon, next to which some of the essays from astrophysics that I dealt with in my time as a science editor look like Harry Potter novels.
For weeks, my colleagues Michael Sauga from Brussels and Nicola Naber from Hamburg, together with the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) research association, examined the documents.
The result revealed how the EU's tax havens are being cheated and how the German government has prevented measures for more transparency.
When we published our research on November 13th, there was unfortunately no great outcry.
Maybe it was because the traffic light negotiations dominated all the debates, maybe the topic was too abstract.
We may not have been able to demonstrate the scope of this policy to readers.
Perhaps the many tax scandals of the past few years have also dulled them a little.
Whatever the case, when the next mini-tax scandal for billion-dollar corporations becomes known, Europe's politicians can no longer pretend they were powerless.
