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By Patrick Costello

Austria hopes to generate hundreds of millions of euros in tax revenue annually with a proposed set of measures targeting online tech giants, Austrian Finance Minister Hartwig Loeger said Wednesday.

"We expect to generate more than 200 million euros ($224 million) from this digital package," Mr. Loeger said in an interview with Austrian broadcaster ORF.

Under the measures, the tax on online advertising revenue for tech giants such as Facebook (FB), Amazon (AMZN) or Google (GOOGL) would increase to 5% from 3% currently, the minister said.

Online intermediary platforms like Airbnb would be also required to disclose bookings and revenue to tax authorities from individual hosts and be taxed accordingly, while the VAT threshold on packages imported from outside the EU would be reduced to zero cents from EUR22, Mr. Loeger said.

The measures are being presented to the Austrian cabinet Wednesday and still require approval from parliament to pass, according to ORF.

Mr. Loeger said roughly EUR15 million of this tax revenue would be put into a fund to help Austrian media houses develop their own digitalization projects and compete better internationally.

The measures--which were previously pursued at the European Union level before being scrapped--aim to restore a balance of "fairness" in taxation of online and offline businesses in Austria, the minister said.

"It cannot be that large international firms do business in Austria without paying any taxes on this," Mr. Loeger said. "We need fair taxation here."

Write to Patrick Costello at patrick.costello@dowjones.com.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 03, 2019 05:52 ET (09:52 GMT)

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