We’ve written a fair bit about tax treaties in the past few days, and have also updated and slightly expanded our tax treaties page. Now, in the spirit of the week, we offer a guest blog from Martina Neuwirth of the Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation (VIDC,) highlighting a study of Austrian tax treaties by Julia Braun and Daniel Fuentes, published in April.
Continue reading “Austria’s tax treaties: reducing developing countries’ revenues?”
Guest blog from the Global Alliance for Tax Justice
Growing inequality within and between countries has become one of the defining issues of our age. It seems a week cannot go by without another damning report looking at the size and harmful consequences of this pervasive problem.
Continue reading “Fair taxes are key to a fair share for all”
In 2012 we published a document entitled Inequality: you don’t know the half of it, in which we made the fairly obvious point that studies estimating inequality almost always fail to take offshore wealth (and income) adequately into account, and thus get things wrong at the top end of the income and wealth scale. We consulted a range of experts, and (as you can see) they all agreed with the basic idea.
We will be doing more work on this in due course, but we just came across this interesting anecdote from the Equality Trust, from May. Continue reading “A reminder of why everyone is underestimating inequality”
Black testifies before U.S. Congress
One of a long line of “quotes of the day: this one from 2013, but still relevant today
The “race to the weakest supervisor” did not occur only within the U.S. Brooksley Born and a former senior SEC official have confirmed to me that UK regulators directly pitched U.S. financial firms to relocate operations to the City of London in order to obtain weaker supervision. “Fed lite” supervision was a competitive response to the FSA’s “reg lite” system of deliberately weak supervision.
The City of London became the most criminogenic environment in the world for financial fraud, which is why so many UK banks and units of foreign banks located in the City have caused the major scandals in the UK and globally.
Continue reading “Quote of the day: City of London and financial fraud”
The EU Savings Tax Directive (EUSTD) has been the EU’s flagship transparency initiative since its introduction in 2003, and we have written about it on many occasions. It complements another EU transparency scheme called the Directive on Administrative Co-operation, which was beefed up this week, as the Wall St. Journal reported:
“European Union finance ministers agreed Tuesday on a far-reaching crackdown on tax evasion that will bring the bloc’s standards on par with global rules by 2017, although Austria is getting an extra year to build up a data-exchange system with its banks.”
Courtesy of New Internationalist
We’ve been (almost) biting our TJN tongues on Mr. Bono’s latest outburst since the weekend. We were waiting for this to come out. Cross-posted from Naked Capitalism, with permission. We’ve tweaked a couple of words here and there.
Bono: Tax Haven Salesman for the Celtic Paper Tiger
By Nicholas Shaxson
Paul Hewson, an Irish crooner who likes to go by the name of Bono, is well known for calling on citizens to spend their tax dollars on fighting poverty in Africa – then setting up fancy structures to dodge paying his own taxes. The British celebrity entertainer Graham Norton skewers Bono effectively: Continue reading “Bono: Tax Haven Salesman for the Celtic Paper Tiger”
More and more very rich people. Click to enlarge
Credit Suisse’s new Global Wealth Report is out. As always, it contains a ream of useful data. For instance, it estimates that global household wealth reached US$263 trillion in mid-2014, up from $117 trillion in 2000:
“Between 2008 and mid-2014, mean wealth per adult grew by 26%; but the same period saw a 54% rise in the number of millionaires, a 106% increase in the number with wealth above USD 100 million, and more than double the number of billionaires.”
Most striking, perhaps, is the global wealth pyramid. Continue reading “Picture of the day: the global wealth pyramid”
Ten years ago Jeffrey Robinson published a book about tax havens called The Sink, where he quotes a U.S. Customs official as saying of Panama:
“The country is filled with dishonest lawyers, dishonest bankers, dishonest company formation agents and dishonest companies registered there by those dishonest lawyers so that they can deposit dirty money into their dishonest banks. The Free Trade Zone is the black hole through which Panama has become one of the filthiest money laundering sinks in the world.”
Continue reading “Tax haven Panama: it’s time for blacklists and sanctions now”
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Our tweet of the day:[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_raw_js]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[/vc_raw_js][vc_column_text]More on Bono’s self-justifications very soon.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
The G20 summit meeting of world leaders in Brisbane next month will have corporate transparency on the agenda. Unsurprisingly, secrecy jurisdictions are working overtime to deflect attention away from their core activities, such as the provision of secrecy and facilities to escape tax, legally or not. Continue reading “The (-ve) Value of Jersey to the UK Economy”
The press release. Click to enlarge.
From Tove Maria Ryding at Eurodad, via email:
At a media event in Washington last week, finance ministers of francophone low-income countries (DRC and Cameroon) demanded a “fair share of global tax revenues” and a “high-level meeting under UN auspices”. Continue reading “African low income countries demand fair share of tax”
Falling poverty rates are something to celebrate – photo: JEC
By Marcus Melo, professor of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, and Armando Barrientos, co-research director of the International Research Institute on Brazil & Africa.
Internationally, debates on tax in Brazil often focus on its refusal to adopt OECD transfer pricing guidelines, but the country’s domestic arrangements also offer a fascinating window on its impressive development progress. Continue reading “Guest blog: Tax and the social contract in Brazil”
TJN-Africa counsel Gitobu Imanyara. (Photo: Dennis Ayemba, west Fm)
Kenya’s Star newspaper is reporting that TJN-Africa has gone to the High Court in Nairobi to stop a double tax treaty between Kenya and Mauritius, which is supposed to come into effect in July 2015.
Not only do tax treaties with tax havens like Mauritius often allow multinational corporations to strip profits artificially out of victim countries (in this case Kenya), but they also insert a secrecy turntable into the transactions and help Kenyan citizens dodge taxes by “round-tripping” investments illicitly through shell companies in Mauritius. Continue reading “TJN Africa takes Kenya government to court over Mauritius treaty”
From Occupy, via email:
OCCUPY IS BACK
Pro-democracy campaigners will occupy Parliament Square in London for nine days next week.
On October 17th Parliament Square will once again be flooded with people who will refuse to be moved.
Update for tax treaty aficionados: we are reminded that the Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation (VIDC) published this study of Austrian tax treaties in April: Austrian Tax Treaties signed with Developing Countries – a Legal and Economic Analysis.
From Finnwatch, a report on Finnish double taxation treaties (DTTs) which analyse how fair and beneficial they are for developing countries. The report was inspired by SOMO’s similar report on Netherlands’ DTTs, published last year, although the Finnwatch report’s scope is somewhat larger, in that it includes also treaty policies on harmful tax competition. Continue reading “How Finland’s tax treaties contradict its development policies”
Kevin Farnsworth
We recently remarked on the good work done by Good Jobs First in highlighting state-level corporate welfare in the United States. Greg Leroy of Good Jobs First also points is towards the work by the Pew Charitable Trusts to bring more transparency to federal-level subsidies and spending. Now, from The Guardian:
“Kevin Farnsworth, a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of York, has spent the best part of a decade studying corporate welfare – delving through Whitehall spreadsheets and others, and poring over Companies House filings. He’s just produced what is, as far as I know, the first ever comprehensive audit of the British corporate welfare state.”
Farnsworth finds that the subsidies and grants paid directly to UK businesses in the financial year 2011-add up to to over £14bn – that is, almost three times the £5bn paid out that year in income-based jobseeker’s allowance.
“Add to that the corporate tax benefits, the value of the cheap credit made available to banks and other business, the insurance schemes run by the government to protect exporters, the marketing for British business laid on by Vince Cable’s ministry, the public procurement from the private sector … Farnsworth calculates that direct corporate welfare costs British taxpayers just shy of £85bn a year. This, he admits, is a conservative estimate.”
This is work that could usefully be done for other countries in the world.
This is from a new Global Witness report entitled “The shell starts to crack? Real owners of Myanmar’s oil and gas blocks come forward.”
We like this picture because it shows, simply, how issues that are at the heart of TJN’s work are so multi-faceted. Illegal logging in Asia connects with the foreclosure mess in the U.S., to blood diamonds and tax evasion. Continue reading “Anonymous company ownership, in a picture”
Zitto Kabwe MP
This is the transcript of the presentation by Zitto Kabwe, MP United Republic of Tanzania delivered to the 60th Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference Yaoundé, Cameroon, 2th – 10th October, 2014 Continue reading “Tanzanian MP Zitto Kabwe calls on Commonwealth to tackle illicit capital flight”
Today’s edition of the Brisbane Times carries a Comment from TJN Australia’s redoubtable campaigner, Dr Mark Zirnsak, responding to the backlash to the recent report on corporate tax avoidance by Australian companies. Continue reading “TJN Australia demands more corporate transparency on tax”
“Are we Swiss all criminals?” The poster asks. No. But many Swiss bankers are.
Updated, Oct 10, with additional analysis from the Swiss “Q and A“:
Switzerland has grudgingly made some important concessions on secrecy in recent years – although we’ve always been at pains to stess that it has happened an inch at a time, and usually bilaterally. Typically, this means making concessions to one country alone – most importantly, the United States, or to the European Union. Each time, it’s been in response to intense pressure. Generally, Swiss bankers have remained at the feeding trough of dirty money from developing countries, since they don’t have the political or economic clout to hurt them back in retaliation for their help-a-plunderer role. Continue reading “Switzerland wants to cherry-pick “partner” countries on transparency”
This has been brewing for some time. An extensive audit has begun in China of transnational corporations (TNCs) shifting profits for service fees and management fees that are paid to related parties, often in tax havens offshore. Continue reading “China taking multinational corporations to task on tax”
From Mauricio Lazala, Deputy Director, Business & Human Rights Resource Centre:
“Recently, I participated in the annual sustainability forum of a global food & beverage company that is highly regarded for its social responsibility policies. The Chairman confidently spoke about their progress on land-grabbings, freedom of association, and access to water. But when somebody mentioned tax avoidance as a human rights issue, he retorted that it was the first time he had heard “tax” and “human rights” mentioned in the same phrase. Continue reading “The words ‘tax’ and ‘human rights’ – now appearing often in the same sentence”