In a statement on its position, the Council said that it recognises the progress made in pursuing the EU's agenda for fairer, more transparent, and more effective taxation, and said it was important to improve the EU and international tax framework to prevent cross-border tax abuse and illicit financial activity.

The Council described recent EU legislation for the automatic exchange of information on tax rulings and on tax related country-by-country reports of multinationals as ‘an important step forward, but said this should be taken further.

One suggestion is that the EU considers options inspired by the work of the OECD Joint International Taskforce on Shared Intelligence and Collaboration (JITSIC), while the Council also wants to see more work done at an international level as well as the EU to ensure that the identities of beneficial owners of companies, legal entities or legal arrangements are known.

The Council stressed the need to prevent the large-scale concealment of funds which hinders the effective fight against tax evasion, money laundering and terrorists, and highlighted the need to increase oversight of enablers and promoters of aggressive tax planning and to introduce more effective disincentives for such activities.

The statement noted the European Commission’s intention to explore possibilities for mandatory disclosure rules inspired by action 12 of the OECD Base Erosion and Profits Shifting (BEP) project, and said it should start to consider the possibility for future exchange of such information between tax administrations in the EU, as well as working closely with other international partners on a possible global approach to greater transparency in this area.

Separately, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) has given the EU annual accounts a clean bill of health for the ninth year in a row. In signing off the accounts, the ECA found that, in particular in cohesion policy and agriculture, the overall estimated level of error for payments has further declined from 4.4% in 2014 to 3.8% in 2015.

No errors were found in the examined revenue transactions, while administrative expenditure continued to be the area with the lowest level of error.

Kristalina Georgieva, European Commission vice-president in charge of budget and human resources, said: ‘The EU budget is all about delivering for people and I am pleased by the progress we are making in this regard and which can be clearly seen in the ECA's latest report. Money is being better directed to where it is needed but it is also being managed more effectively. We need to do more of this. EU money belongs to our citizens and we owe it to them that every euro is well spent, in accordance with the rules.'

In the cases where the Commission finds that EU funds were spent incorrectly, it takes measures to claw the money back - the average being roughly €3bn every year. For the financial year 2015, the Commission estimates that future claw-back measures could bring the remaining amount at risk to a level between 0.8% and 1.3% of payments.