Singapore punishment for tax dodgers: pound them with stone mallet

The fate of tax dodgers. Photo (presumably) Duncan Green.

Oxfam’s Duncan Green is in Singapore, where he’s visited an exhibition of the mythical Chinese ‘ten courts of hell’, which he describes as an equivalent to Dante’s Inferno. The punishments?

Well, for misusing books, you get “‘Thrown onto tree of knives; body sawn into two’,” while for corruption you face “Thrown into volcanic http://healthsavy.com/product/effexor/ pit; frozen into blocks of ice; thrown into pools of blood and drowned.”

Nice. He linked each infraction to an NGO working in the area, and what caught our eye was this:

“NGOs: Tax Justice Network, Christian Aid, ActionAid

Crime: Tax Dodging

Punishment: ‘Pounded by stone mallet, grounded by large stone.’ “

Perhaps strange, then, that Singapore has made a business model out of encouraging all this stuff.