The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, said yesterday that the Government will continue to defend the so-called Google Tax after the arrival of Joe Biden as President of the United States and will opt for a negotiated solution to the EU’s trade disputes with Washington, including the tariffs imposed by Donald Trump on European and Spanish products in retaliation for the dispute between Boeing and Airbus.
Speaking on the RNE programme Las Mañanas, González Laya said that Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House marks the beginning of a “very hopeful” moment in relations with the United States, since “his first measures show that his desire is to give a joint response to issues in which there is no room for unilateralism”, such as climate change or the coronavirus pandemic, unlike the “unilateralist tendency” of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
“The very clear message coming from Washington is that they want more alliances, and the EU is a great ally of the United States”, she continued. For this reason, the minister said she was convinced that the arrival of the new US government is an opportunity to address “through negotiation” the “trade conflicts that exist” with the United States, including the tariffs imposed by Washington on numerous European and Spanish products, especially agricultural and food products.
“Our trade with the United States is fair trade”, but “we have been unjustly accused of unfair competition”, González Laya lamented. For this reason, she warned, it is necessary to seek a negotiated solution to the dispute between Airbus and Boeing, “which has been dragging on for many years” with measures and countermeasures that have “seriously affected Spanish exports that have nothing to do with the aeronautical sector, especially in the agri-food sector”.
On the other hand, the minister defended the need to defend before Joe Biden’s new Administration, in a negotiated manner and if possible within the multilateral framework, the creation of worldwide taxes on digital activity, following the latest warnings from the US authorities to Spain for the “discriminatory” application of the popularly known Google Tax.
In this regard, she said, the Spanish government’s objective is to convince the international community that “it is more useful and effective” to design and apply these taxes on digital activities “multilaterally”, rather than simply applying and designing them at a national level, as it is “intelligent” to do so in a coordinated and multilateral manner within the OECD and with the support of the United States and countries such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore.
