European Union finance ministers were meeting on Saturday to discuss how to crack down on tax cheats and create a banking union, a project that has caused major rifts within their ranks.

The fight against tax evasion has become an international rallying cry, with EU countries having agreed to close loopholes and pave the way for bank secrecy to be curtailed.

The ministers’ informal talks in Lithuania were due to focus on the push for a global system to automatically share information on account holders.

But problems remain, notably on the issue of tax avoidance by large companies. The Financial Times daily reported this week that EU authorities are looking into the tax deals that Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands offer to multinationals.

“We will not accept that just some countries are singled out,” Luxembourg Finance Minister Luc Frieden had said during the first day of talks on Friday. “We want a fair, transparent system and it must be an efficient system that encourages growth and the creation of jobs.” The ministers were also set to debate the future shape of the financial system, a discussion expected to be overshadowed by disagreements on how to proceed with the crisis-thwarting banking union, considered key to restoring confidence in the eurozone.

Germany has joined forces with Britain and Sweden to challenge plans for a eurozone-wide scheme to wind down troubled banks on legal grounds.

“I think there was broader support for the German position than people expected,” Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg noted.

Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who chairs the eurozone finance ministers’ Eurogroup panel, has nevertheless expressed hope that common ground can be found by the end of the year.

“So far, there have been cannon shots going back and forth, but there hasn’t actually been a debate on how it could be solved,” he noted.

“It’s a revolution that we’re doing in the eurozone banking sector,” added the EU’s market regulation commissioner, Michel Barnier. “It takes time, it’s not something that falls from the sky.”

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