Nick Shaxson ■ Singapore punishment for tax dodgers: pound them with stone mallet

Singapore punishment for tax dodgers: pound them with stone mallet

Nick Shaxson

Published:

2 May 2014

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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.

The author

Nick Shaxson

Nicholas Shaxson is a journalist and writer on the staff of Tax Justice Network. He is author of the book Poisoned Wells about the oil industry in Africa, published in 2007, and the more recent Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the Men who Stole the World, published by Random House in January 2011. He lives in Berlin.

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