UK government on Swiss tax deal: TJN was right

In October 2011 we wrote a long report about why a new tax agreement between the UK and Switzerland was doomed to fail. Not only was it a reprehensible amnesty for criminal tax evaders, but it was full of loopholes so egregious it can only have been deliberately crafted with their interests in mind. (If you think that’s hyperbole: why would they create a deliberate and explicit exemption for ‘discretionary’ structures – the bread and butter of British tax-evading structures? See Section 3.1 of the report for the ugly details)

Now we see a report from UK satirical magazine Private Eye:

“The deal was so …poor, and potentially in breach of European law, that a team of officials flew to Zürich last week to begin renegotiating it.”

The agreement originally forecast that the deal would rase up to seven billion pounds, or ten billion or so U.S. dollars’ worth of tax revenues. We predicted they would be lucky to get close to a tenth of that. So far, with the lion’s share of revenues already in, they’ve raised roughly what we predicted.