Page 77 – Tax Justice Network

In the next taxcast: democracy for sale, via tax havens

Another day, another political party funding scandal.

This time it’s (again!) the UK, and its third largest party the Liberal Democrats. We will start with a quote.

“Tax-haven lobbyists and beneficiaries have captured and corrupted our party political fundraising.”

That’s not us saying it: it’s Donnachadh McCarthy, former Liberal Democrat Deputy Chair. And he should know. On this month’s Taxcast (our monthly podcast, out on March 21) you’ll hear how he tried for years to get the Liberal Democrats to tackle the scandal of party political funding. Until he realised that: Continue reading “In the next taxcast: democracy for sale, via tax havens” →

City of London helps UK ‘betray’ US again: this time it’s over China

A year ago today’s TJN blogger wrote an article for The American Interest magazine entitled Putin, the U.S. and the City of London: The Much-Too-Special-Relationship. It made the bold statement:

“The truth is that the City of London is a greater potential threat to the national security of the United States than almost anyone supposes.”

And it quoted Ben Judah, author of a controversial New York Times article on the subject, as saying:

“Britain is ready to betray the United States to protect the City of London’s hold on dirty Russian money. And forget about Ukraine.”

Well, in that episode the angry words were largely confined to the media. Now we have another episode where the U.S. government is getting involved directly, pointing out that the City of London seems to have led the UK away from its traditional alliance with the United States.

It is just as we predicted then, and continue to predict. This time, it’s not Russia but China. Continue reading “City of London helps UK ‘betray’ US again: this time it’s over China” →

Quote of the day: the Irish template for corporate bullying

click on the chart to enlarge

Yesterday, we re-posted a blog about the Irish Celtic Tiger myth from the Fool’s Gold site to the Naked Capitalism blog. The blog seeks to debunk the myth that tax “competition” was crucial to Ireland’s development in the 1980s and 1990s. Continue reading “Quote of the day: the Irish template for corporate bullying” →

Did Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate create the Celtic Tiger?

From the Fools’ Gold Blog, a new TJN-backed project on ‘competitiveness’. This article has also been cross-posted with Naked Capitalism.

Update, 2019: This issue is explored much more fully in the Celtic Tiger chapter in the Finance Curse book.

Ireland has long been a poster child for corporate tax-cutting. The standard argument goes something like this. “Ireland has very low corporate taxes . . . Celtic Tiger . . . just goes to show that corporate tax cuts grow your economy.” This argument is popular in Ireland too where government officials like to call the flagship 12.5 percent corporate income tax rate a “cornerstone” of industrial policy.

But is any of this even true?

Well, now take a look at this little graph. Continue reading “Did Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate create the Celtic Tiger?” →

First newsletter of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice

This is the first newsletter of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice. For the full version, with images, click here. To sign up for GATJ’s newsletter, please click here.

Welcome to the first newsletter of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (versión en español abajo).

Happy International Women’s Day

Gender equality and tax justice are top of our agenda with two events as we celebrate International Women’s Day.

We will also host a Women, Equality and Tax Justice workshop at the upcoming World Social Forum in Tunisa. Continue reading “First newsletter of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice” →

New Expert Global Commission Responds to One-Sided Tax Debate

This press release was put together by a group of organisations including TJN.

Expert Global Commission Responds to One-Sided Tax Debate; Inaugural Meeting to drive changes ahead of Post-2015 Ambition

Responding to widespread anger about corporate tax avoidance, the impacts of such avoidance on inequality and poverty, and concerns that current tax reform processes are inadequate, a new nonpartisan body— the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT)—has been established to propose reforms from the perspective of the public interest. Continue reading “New Expert Global Commission Responds to One-Sided Tax Debate” →

Fools’ Gold: new project on ‘competitiveness’

TJN has been incubating a new project to look at the issue of the ‘competitiveness’ of nations, a subject that has been dear to our heart for a long time. With help from the University of Warwick in the UK, the idea is to create new communities and discussions over this subject.

While tax ‘competition’ (which we prefer to call tax wars) is a core issue for the new project, it will look at ‘competition’ between jurisdictions on other issues such as secrecy, lax financial regulation, and other areas of public policy where measures to protect the public interest are being degraded in a race to the bottom.

The first element of the project is a new blog, just launched, which will collect analysis on this huge and multi-faceted issue. This new blog about ‘competitiveness’ is called Fools’ Gold, for fairly obvious reasons, and its url is foolsgold.international.

Follow it on twitter, here.

Though the project (purely for reasons of manageability) will initially focus fairly strongly on the UK, the aim is to widen discussions over time to include a range of countries, rich and poor, around the world. We hope to engage academics, professionals, journalists, and many others in creating a community of people to tackle these issues and skewer the popular myths out there.

For more details, read the introductory Fools’ Gold blog, here.

City of London Corporation in ‘failure to support transparency’ shocker

Not in favour of transparency

Father William Taylor, an elected member of the City of London Corporation, has blogged an interesting exchange he had last week with Mark Boleat, who chairs the Corporation’s Policy Committee. The crux of the exchange is that the Corporation will not be supporting the proposal before the UK parliament for a public registry of beneficial ownership (i.e. the true owners of a company) on the grounds that this is a unilateral measure and transparency should only be adopted through a “coordinated international approach”. This sounds very much like the City telling the government to kick the whole project into the long grass. Continue reading “City of London Corporation in ‘failure to support transparency’ shocker” →

The Next Rising Tax Haven

TJN’s Andres Knobel has just had his article, The Next Rising Tax Haven, published in the Spring edition of the World Policy Journal. As the following extract suggests, the rise and rise of a tiny wealthy elite, who will go to great lengths to avoid paying taxes, means that tax havens are adapting to meet the demands of a plutocratic world order:
Continue reading “The Next Rising Tax Haven” →

Event: can low income countries ever tax transnational corporations?

From the Institute of Development Studies:

Wednesday 11 March 2015 13:00 to 14:30
IDS, Convening Space

Mick Moore will talk as a political realist and Alex Cobham, Research Director of the Tax Justice Network, as a magical realist.

About the series

Inequalities in various forms have been rising in most parts of the world since the 1980s, but only recently has inequality begun to attract mainstream attention, including from the IMF and the World Bank.

How should the development community react to this newfound recognition of inequality or inequalities as a core element – and core problem – of development? What contemporary forms are inequalities taking, and how do they relate to diverse forms of injustice? How can these be understood – and tackled? Where are the opportunities within development to exercise intellectual leadership in this rapidly growing field?

Bankers have a moral compass, it just may not look like yours

Jörg Wiegratz

Guest blog by Jörg Wiegratz, lecturer in political economy of global development, University of Leeds

We’re getting rather used to revelations about sharp practice in the banking sector. The row about HSBC’s tax services to rich clients has raised, yet again, crucial questions about the business culture which allows such scandals to emerge. Continue reading “Bankers have a moral compass, it just may not look like yours” →

New report: how corrupt capital is used to buy property in the UK

From Transparency International, a landmark study looking at the role the UK’s real estate sector has played in laundering the world’s money. We don’t have time to do this justice, but the world’s media has done a good job covering it.

Unmask the Corrupt: How UK Property Launders the Wealth of the Global Corrupt.

Also see this recent excellent New York Times series looking at dirty money in New York real estate, and an earlier Vanity Fair article, written by a TJN author, about an expensive apartment block in London.

Quote of the day – accountants and austerity

Want to know why austerity is so popular among the political classes of so many countries? Well, there are many reasons, but here is one you may not have considered. From Prof. Prem Sikka, via email:

“Accountants are trained to be class warriors and austerity is written into their psyche as they are taught to reduce labour cost, but never the return to capital.”

Continue reading “Quote of the day – accountants and austerity” →

How to kickstart sluggish growth: tax corporations more

Corporate tax-cutting, in action

The Financial Times columnist John Plender he has written an exellent article that contains a number of points – every single one of which, bar one, has previously been argued by TJN. We won’t summarise them all – please read the full article, if you have a subscription, but it’s almost uncanny how much he agrees with our position (whether he’s read our stuff, we don’t know.)

He begins by noting that the US corporate income tax take has fallen from 5.9 percent of GDP in the early 1950s, when a mini-ideology known as Public Choice Theory became all the rage, arguing that

“a predatory state was using its tax-collecting power to maximise revenue in the interests of self-serving politicians and bureaucrats.”

Continue reading “How to kickstart sluggish growth: tax corporations more” →

The Tax Justice Research Bulletin – 1(2)

February 2015 This is the second Tax Justice Research Bulletin, a monthly series dedicated to tracking the latest developments in policy-relevant research on national and international taxation. Continue reading “The Tax Justice Research Bulletin – 1(2)” →

HSBC and the world’s oldest drug cartel

HSBC’s core values are under scrutiny. The bank has been implicated in one scandal after another, and the current leadership claims to be wanting to restore the bank’s reputation. But what reputation do they aim to restore? Continue reading “HSBC and the world’s oldest drug cartel” →

On using tax holidays to ‘pay for’ stuff

From Jaimie Woo in the Huffington Post:

“A strangely popular proposal would give companies a temporary tax holiday, letting corporations bring back their money on paper, or “repatriate” it at an extremely low tax rate, thereby encouraging more corporate tax dodging in the future. The most ridiculous part? Some Members of Congress want to use this tax break that costs money to “pay for” badly needed infrastructure investments. How does that even make sense?“

Our emphasis added. Indeed. A good generic question not just for the United States, the subject of this particular article.

The UK Gold – watch the UK Network Premiere

The documentary film UK Gold, looking at Britain’s role in the world of tax havens and in international tax issues more generally, is having its first network premiere tonight, on London Live. The music score is now available, courtesy of UK Uncut, here.

Details are here, with background reading from Richard Murphy, here.

And here is another reminder – as if one were needed – that the tax haven industry has achieved quite a degree of ‘capture’ not only of the UK policy making apparatus, but the media too.

It’s time to stop extraditing public-interest whistleblowers

TJN has just co-signed a letter published by the U.S. Governmental Accountability Project (GAP,) drawing attention to the topsy-turvy situation where whistleblowers acting in the public interest are being extradited to other countries, under procedures that were originally created to fight against Mafia organisations, terrorist financiers, international criminals and so on.

Tools for fighting for the public interest are being turned against the public interest.

This letter focuses on tax evasion and it is aimed at public authorities in the United States. See GAP’s version of the letter here.

But this extradition issue obviously has relevance well beyond tax evasion, and far beyond the United States. Continue reading “It’s time to stop extraditing public-interest whistleblowers” →

Whistleblowers – the new countercultural heroes

The Luxleaks whistleblower Antoine Deltour. Let’s not forget the others

From Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone magazine:

“This is the age of the whistleblower. From Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden to the latest cloak-and-dagger lifter of files, ex-HSBC employee Hervé Falciani, whistleblowers are becoming to this decade what rock stars were to the Sixties — pop culture icons, global countercultural heroes.”

Among other things, it’s time to start treating jailed whistleblowers as prisoners of conscience.

We should exempt people blowing the whistle in the public interest from extradition procedures originally created to crack down on Mafia money, terrorist financing, and that kind of thing (update: see our co-signed letter on this, here.)

And much more.

Women and Tax Justice at Beijing+20: Registration Open

Registration is open for the Queen’s University
Feminist Legal Studies International Women’s Day conference

Women and Tax Justice at Beijing+20: Taxing and Budgeting for Sex Equality
Mar. 6 from noon through dinner
Mar. 7 from 9 am to 5 pm

To register email Melissa.Howlett@queensu.ca

Keynote lecture:
Dr. Attiya Waris, School of Law, University of Nairobi, Kenya;
Faculty of Law, National University of Rwanda, and
Queen’s University Principal’s Development Fund International Visitor –
‘Rights of Women and Taxation: Developing Country Perspectives’

For the complete program see: Programme – Women and Tax Justice at Beijing+20.

Sponsored by Feminist Legal Studies Queen’s, Women for Tax Justice,
FemTax International, Canadians for Tax Fairness, Faculty of Law,
Queen’s University, and SSHRC

Fact of the day: how often has Britain’s ‘non-dom’ rule been challenged?

Britain’s domicile rule is one of the greatest tools available to the world’s wealthiest people to shake of the pesky burden of tax, leaving the rest of us to kindly pay their share for them. It’s a slippery, vague concept, and lots of people who claim domicile status really ought not to be able to. With this short background, here’s our factoid of the day, courtesy of UK barrister Jolyon Maugham:

“In the last ten years (which is as far back as I checked), there’s only been one concluded challenge to domicile, nine years ago. There’s also a single indication of a challenge to come.”

Goodness. Coming in the wake of the HSBC scandal, which shows a resolute determination on the part of the government not to do anything to inconvenience the world’s wealthiest people, this is quite a shocker.

Yeah, right. Photo: Jill & David

About the series

Recommended reading

Thank you!