As I've noted, the EU's now issued a coherent strategy for tackling tax evasion and tax avoidance that it is asking the member states to adopt.

There are some small point of satisfaction for me in this. First, I wrote on this issue earlier this year. It's good to see something you've done have an impact. I offer my thanks to the EU Progressive Alliance of Socialists & Democrats (Labour in the UK context) for making that happen.

Second, when doing that work I estimated that the cost of tax avoidance tax evasion in the EU was €1 trillion a year. As Commissioner Semeta said in the opening line of his press release:

Around one trillion euros is lost to tax evasion and avoidance every year in the EU. Not only is this is a scandalous loss of much-needed revenue, it is also a threat to fair taxation.

Quite so. So now I've persuaded the EU of my approach to estimating tax avoidance. Just the UK to go, where the Treasury remains firmly in denial of the reality of the scale of the problem they face.