BRATISLAVA, March 25, (WEBNOVINY) – The new special tax for banks should contribute EUR 40 million to the next year’s budget, the Finance Ministry estimates in its draft outlines of the general government budget for 2012 to 2014. According to the Finance Ministry State Secretary Vladimir Tvaroska, the new tax will definitively not burden the bank’s equity capital. The quantification of next year’s revenue from the bank levy stems from calculations that the tax will be paid from corporate deposits, which, unlike personal deposits, are not taxed at present. “A similar number, namely 0.2 percent, will be imposed also on deposits for which at present a contribution to the Deposit Protection Fund is not paid,” Tvaroska told Friday’s news conference. He added that concrete setup of the bank levy will be subject to further talks.
The Finance Ministry plans to introduce the bank tax as of next year. If Slovakia was to introduce the new bank tax in coordination with other European Union countries, it would probably not be introduced before 2013, said Finance Minister Ivan Miklos earlier this week. “The opinions of many countries are so different that a realistic prediction of when a unified European directive on how to do so could become a reality is 2013 at the earliest, but more probably in 2014. It looks as though the process of searching for a European consensus is much slower than we hoped,” said Miklos last week.
MPs will debate introduction of the bank levy already at the ongoing parliamentary session. The opposition SMER-SD proposes to impose a levy of 0.73 percent of selected liabilities on banks. Miklos sees the proposal of SMER, which tried to push it forward already last year, as a populist gesture. According to him, the high tax rate proposed by the opposition would harm the Slovak economy, as banks would translate it into fees and interest rates.
SITA