Commission withdraws financial transaction tax, transfer pricing and forestry proposals

The European Commission has formally withdrawn 22 pending legislative proposals, among them the financial transaction tax and four company-taxation files that had been blocked in the Council for years. The withdrawal list was published in the Official Journal of the European Union, C series, on 29 October 2026 under reference C/2026/5770 (CELEX:C_202605770). The decision takes effect through that publication, and no further parliamentary step is recorded in the notice.

The notice, headed “Withdrawal of Commission proposals”, states that the College of Commissioners approved the withdrawal of the pending proposals during its 2576th meeting on 22 July 2026. The reasons for each withdrawal are set out in COM(2025)870 final of 21 October 2025, Annex IV, to which the published list refers. The entries are grouped under the political priorities of the current Commission mandate, from “A new plan for Europe’s sustainable prosperity and competitiveness” to “Delivering together and preparing our Union for the future”.

Five tax files removed after years in the Council

The taxation casualties are the core of the list, all of them Council directives requiring unanimity among Member States:

• COM(2013)71 final (2013/0045, CNS): proposal for a Council Directive implementing enhanced cooperation in the area of the financial transaction tax.
• COM(2021)565 final (2021/0434, CNS): proposal for a Council Directive laying down rules to prevent the misuse of shell entities for tax purposes and amending Directive 2011/16/EU, the so-called ATAD 3 file.
• COM(2022)216 final (2022/0154, CNS): proposal for a Council Directive on rules for a debt-equity bias reduction allowance and on limiting the deductibility of interest for corporate income tax purposes.
• COM(2023)529 final (2023/0322, CNS): proposal for a Council Directive on transfer pricing.
• COM(2020)749 final (2020/0331, CNS): proposal for a Council Directive amending Directive 2006/112/EC as regards conferral of implementing powers to the Commission to determine the meaning of terms used in certain provisions of that VAT directive.

The financial transaction tax dates from 2013 and rested on enhanced cooperation among a subset of Member States; the shell-entity and transfer-pricing texts came from the Commission’s post-2021 anti-avoidance drive. Their removal leaves the EU’s corporate tax framework where it stood before that push.

Forestry package falls alongside the tax files

Two files on forests, both subject to the ordinary legislative procedure, also disappear:

• COM(2023)727 final (2023/0410, COD): proposal for a Decision of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Council Decision 89/367/EEC setting up a Standing Forestry Committee.
• COM(2023)728 final (2023/0413, COD): proposal for a Regulation on a monitoring framework for resilient European forests.

Both sat under the heading “Sustaining our quality of life: food security, water and nature”, the same block that carries the withdrawal of the mandate proposal on the International Seabed Authority (COM(2021)1 final, 2020/0372, NLE).

Own resources, sports conventions and other cleared texts

The remaining entries clear dossiers far removed from tax policy:

• A Council Regulation on goods covered by quality schemes under Protocol 10 to the Act of Accession, concerning Cyprus (COM(2015)380 final, 2015/0165, NLE).
• A codification on protection of workers from carcinogens, mutagens and reprotoxic substances (COM(2023)738 final, 2023/0421, COD).
• Four Council Decisions on signature and conclusion of the Council of Europe Convention on the manipulation of sports competitions (COM(2015)084, COM(2015)086, COM(2017)386 and COM(2017)387).
• A recast Regulation implementing the Kimberley Process certification scheme for rough diamonds (COM(2021)115 final, 2021/0060, COD).
• Six own-resources texts, including COM(2021)570 final and its amended version COM(2023)331 final, plus the implementing regulations COM(2022)101, COM(2023)333, COM(2022)102 and COM(2023)332.

For readers, the practical effect is that no EU-wide transaction tax, no common shell-entity reporting duty and no bloc-wide transfer-pricing rule will reach the statute book from these drafts; multinationals keep relying on national rules and the existing Directive 2011/16/EU exchange framework, while Member States retain full latitude on debt-equity allowances and interest deductibility. Budgetary planning that had assumed receipts from a financial transaction tax or from the new own-resources basket loses those assumptions, and the forestry monitoring framework will not proceed in its proposed form.

Source: Official Journal of the European Union, C series, C/2026/5770, 29 October 2026, Notices, p. 1/3 (official reference: CELEX:C_202605770).