The meeting of the Board of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) on 22 November again ended in failure. The chances of reaching agreement on the revision of Directive 69/169 EEC on the exemption from turnover tax and excise duty on imports for international travellers now seem remote (see Europolitics3064) despite the Finnish EU Presidency having offered two proposals to the delegations. The first solution, based on a suggestion by the European Commission, involves maintaining two different ceilings (above which passengers would be required to pay tax): a ceiling of €500 for air passengers and a ceiling of €300 for land and sea passengers. The Commission’s original proposal suggested an increase from the €175 ceiling to €500 for air passengers and from €175 to €220 for other means of transport. The Finnish proposal includes two further sub-variations depending on whether or not the compromise would be compulsory or optional in all member states. The second option involves creating a single ceiling of €350 for all modes of transport. After further discussions between the delegations, all the hypotheses were considered possible, yet none of them was accepted unanimously by all member states. In the margins of the meeting, the Finnish Presidency also proposed an additional option of applying different quantitative limits for importing tobacco depending on whether it entered European soil by land or sea.

The Presidency’s compromise is available at www.europolitics.info => subscribers => advanced search => reference = 66251