About Nick Shaxson
Take action to stop corporate tax cheating in Europe
* SIGN THE PETITION ON CORPORATE TAX TRANSPARENCY NOW * Every year, corporate tax avoidance costs countries around the world an estimated US$ 500 billion or more. One reason for these losses is that companies are able to hide their financial affairs: from tax authorities, and from the public. More transparency will improve tax collection, and help pay for many
Read the full article…How GDP masks the finance curse
Every country needs a financial centre, but as it grows beyond a certain optimal size (where it is carrying out the functions it is supposed to do) it starts to harm the country that hosts it. That is the finance curse, and many countries including the United States and United Kingdom passed that point decades ago. Shrinking the financial centres
Read the full article…MTN uses Netherlands tax haven to escape African tax bills
From the Uganda Observer: South African telecoms giant MTN appears to have avoided paying any capital gains tax in Uganda on the lucrative sale of its investment in mobile phone masts in the country. MTN’s latest financial statements show a profit of 1.3 billion South African Rand – almost $80 million — from the sale of its interests in Uganda.
Read the full article…Murky Ghana gold deal raises questions about Jersey
Update: the previous blog had the incorrect link for the Angola-Russia deal. The correct link has been inserted. Update: Sept 28. IMANI Africa: 10 most alarming problems with Agyapa Royalties deal Update: there’s now a petition you can sign and share, available here. From Ghana Business News: On the last days before Ghana’s Parliament went on recess the government laid
Read the full article…How ‘Digital Trade’ rules would make it harder for lower-income countries to tax or regulate the digital economy
International tax rules and international trade rules are unfair to lower-income countries: that is not only well known, but unsurprising. Rules are generally set by the most powerful parties at the table. What is more, the tax rules and the trade rules interact, with trade rules frequently inflicting damage on the tax systems of lower-income countries. The rapid transition to
Read the full article…HSBC threatens UK amid Coronavirus crisis
The Financial Times reports: The Bank of England’s pressure on HSBC to cancel its dividend for the first time in 74 years has reignited a debate at the top of the bank over whether it should redomicile to Hong Kong. This is shocking, on several levels. First, that’s a direct threat by HSBC against UK policymakers – in the middle
Read the full article…Could the wealth in tax havens help us pay for the Coronavirus response?
As economies crumble under coronavirus pandemic, powerful interests are hoping to get rich from huge government bailouts. A well-informed Washington D.C. insider described the latest U.S. bailout package, for instance, as a “corporate coup” to reshape the U.S. economy: “it’s really really bad, and much of the bad stuff is not being included in the sleazy marketing materials . .
Read the full article…Tax justice and the coronavirus
Update: the second article in this series is entitled Could the wealth in tax havens help us pay for the Coronavirus response? The Covid-19 Coronavirus pandemic is, at least on available evidence, striking rich western countries the hardest so far. Lower-income countries will be hit hard too, however: massive capital flight is already underway. And in all societies, as ever,
Read the full article…How the Finance Curse hurts U.S. agriculture
An article in the U.S. magazine The Nation, written by today’s blogger (pictured above), highlights how the finance curse strikes U.S. agriculture. It starts by focusing on the political divides that seem to have opened up between the so-called “coastal elites” which tend to vote for Democrats, and more rural constituencies, which voted more heavily for Donald Trump in the
Read the full article…After Brexit, EU blacklists UK’s territory Cayman
From the Financial Times: The Cayman Islands will join Oman, Fiji, and Vanuatu on an EU blacklist of foreign tax havens, making it the first UK overseas territory to be named and shamed by Brussels We have lambasted Europe’s blacklists for years, which are based above all on political considerations. In particular, the EU does not seem to want to
Read the full article…Luanda Leaks: the effects on the ground in Africa
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has today published a set of reports based on 715,000 leaked documents about Angola, and particularly Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of former President José Eduardo dos Santos. In summary, dos Santos enjoyed tremendous Angolan state largesse to amass a large fortune overseas, using more than 400 shell companies and other structures —
Read the full article…IMF: shrink the financial sector to reduce inequality
The IMF has just published a new Staff Discussion Note entitled “Finance and Inequality,” by Martin Čihák and Ratna Sahay. The shortest summary of its conclusions is: too much finance makes countries more unequal. And in the words of the IMF’s new Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, introducing the study, rising inequality: is reminiscent of the early part of the 20th
Read the full article…On raising tax in Africa
The Economist is running an article on a subject dear to our hearts, entitled “African governments are trying to collect more tax. It contains some useful data and quotes, such as this: It also quotes Logan Wort, Executive Secretary of the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF,) saying that administrative reforms like strengthening IT systems or adopting taxpayer identification numbers helped,
Read the full article…The Competitiveness Files: Martin Wolf
In 2015 we set up a new website called Fools’ Gold, dedicated to investigating (and skewering) the woolly concept of “national competitiveness,” which is so widely (mis)used by many politicians, and so derided by many economists. We are closing the Fools’ Gold site now, for operational reasons, but we’ll use it as an opportunity to re-publish some of the core
Read the full article…If tax havens scare you, monopolies should too. And vice versa.
Europe Needs a “Tax Justice Network for monopolies.” Introduction The BBC recently carried a short article which began: “Luxembourg’s data privacy watchdog says it is in discussions with Amazon about voice recordings made of customers who have used the firm’s Alexa smart assistant. The regulator is the “Lead Supervisory Authority” (LSA) for the company in the EU, meaning that it
Read the full article…
