Paris, October 5

The world’s advanced economies announced today a long-awaited plan to close the loopholes on tax-avoiding multinationals that cost countries over $100 billion a year, declaring: ‘Playtime is over’.

Low tax bills for big names such as Google and McDonald’s, which managed to sharply reduce the amount due while remaining within the law, have provoked public outrage in recent years.

Now wealthy nations’ policy advisory group, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has revealed its final recommendations: a 15-point plan to prevent firms from exploiting different countries’ tax rules.

The charity Oxfam decried the scheme as a ‘toothless’ package that will do nothing to stop poor nations being cheated out of billions of dollars. Businesses fretted it could lead to double taxation.But the OECD was confident the plan would be effective.

“Playtime is over,” Pascal Saint-Amans, who supervised the drawing up of the so-called Base Erosion and Profit

Shifting (BEPS) plan, told AFP.

Multinational companies will find it harder and harder to game national tax systems, Saint-Amans predicted.

The plan, which applies to international firms with revenues of at least 750 million euros, is to be submitted

for approval by Group of 20 top world economies at a meeting of finance ministers next week. It will then go to a G-20 leaders’ summit in November for their endorsement.