Rubalcaba: “Take 500-euro notes out of circulation to stop fraud and forgery and pay the tax clawed back to the poor”
Sunday, April 21, 2013 @ 10:59 PM
BANKNOTES of 500 euros may be scrapped to cut down on forgery rackets, tax evasion and poverty.
Leader of the opposition socialist party, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, says that by taking them out of circulation, the 500-euro notes found to be genuine could be spent on helping those living in poverty in Spain, a figure which could be as high as nearly half the population and already includes over 2.2 million children, according to official records.
Spain has more 500-euro notes than anywhere else in the European Union and about a quarter of those in circulation are within the country.
Rubalcaba says that by taking 500-euro notes out of circulation in Spain, those who had them would be obliged to change them, which would mean explaining where they came from and automatically being subject to any tax on them which they had tried to avoid paying.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com