BERLIN (dpa-AFX) – Berlin’s governing mayor Franziska Giffey (SPD) considers taxing these extra profits to be conceivable in order to limit high war-related profits of energy companies. That said the Vice-Chair of the Prime Ministers’ Conference on Thursday evening after consultations between the federal states and Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) in Berlin.
“If there are excessive profits, which are also significantly there, I find the idea of examining a profit limitation clause interesting,” said Giffey. “And also the question to what extent (…) profits can also be taxed in a certain way.” The federal government must examine what is legally possible and have also promised to do so. It cannot be that a crisis situation is exploited to maximize one’s own profit.
Giffey referred to an advance by Bremen. The federal state announced on Tuesday that it would submit an application to the Federal Council on June 10 with the aim of imposing a temporary special tax on some of the excess profits made by mineral oil companies as a result of price jumps caused by the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine.
The city-state left it open how the legal and technical design of a special tax should look in detail. The application is intended to ask the federal government to develop a proposal for a legal basis for levying a special levy.
At their meeting in the afternoon without Scholz, the heads of government of the federal states had asked the federal government in a resolution to take “regulatory measures” to prevent further speculation with oil, gas and electricity and also to limit the previous price increases under antitrust law check over.
The problem with the antitrust check is that the evidence is not that easy, Giffey added./kr/DP/he