About Nick Shaxson
HSBC: a very different relocation, tax haven to muckier tax haven
We’ve just written about HSBC’s extensive lobbying effort to water down UK banking reforms by pretending it was planning to throw its toys out of the pram relocate its head office from London to Hong Kong if it didn’t get what it wanted. But inside HSBC, a very real relocation is underway. Via TJN contacts, this email has been sent
Read the full article…TJN’s Cobham in top-ranked UK & Ireland economists
From the right wing UK finance publication City A.M., a ranking of the top 100 economists in the U.K. Follow Alex on Twitter here. TweetShare
Why Google (and other multinationals) are still not paying their fair share of corporation tax
This guest blog by Tommaso Faccio of Nottingham business school complements a guest blog we ran on Friday by Sol Picciotto, also about Google’s all-important tax affairs. Why Google (and other multinationals) are still not paying their fair share of corporation tax Google says that it pays the tax required by every company in every country it operates. This is true
Read the full article…HSBC opts to stay in ‘competitive’ London. (It was never going to leave anyway)
From the Fools’ Gold blog, yesterday: There’s been a lot of talk for a long time about a threat from globe-trotting HSBC to move its headquarters from London to Hong Kong. It seems there’s been a resolution of the question for now, of sorts. As Bloomberg puts it: “HSBC Holdings Plc recommitted its future to London, ending 10 months of deliberations over whether to
Read the full article…Netherlands, UK push for more transparency
From the Financial Transparency Coalition: Dutch government plans to grant public access to beneficial ownership register Earlier this week, the Dutch Finance Minister, Mr Dijsselbloem, announced that the government would make the upcoming register of beneficial ownership, the so-called UBO-register, open to the public. This is in line with what the majority of parliament voted for in March 2014, and
Read the full article…Which countries have the right to tax Google’s income?
Recently, amid the furore over Google’s surprisingly low tax payments in the UK and in other countries, it has been suggested, as one observer put it to us: “The claim is that international tax law accrues profits to where products are created, and not where sales are made. For example, a UK company that makes lots of sales in the US still pays most
Read the full article…Call for Papers: Third Annual Amartya Sen Prize Competition
Call for Papers: Third Annual Amartya Sen Prize Competition Submission Deadline: August 29, 2016 The third Amartya Sen Prize is soliciting papers on the non-revenue impact of curbing illicit financial flows. Poor populations are hurt when rich individuals and multinational corporations surreptitiously shift trillions of dollars in wealth and profits out of less developed countries. One harm arises from the loss
Read the full article…New signs that Cayman might dismantle its secrecy law
Cayman politicians love to pretend that they aren’t living in a tax haven. No, they’re part of a responsible international financial centre. And, as we’ve remarked ad nauseam, they all say that. It’s almost a defining feature of tax havens (or, if you prefer to emphasise one important aspect, secrecy jurisdictions.) Now Cayman has a particularly pernicious piece of secrecy legislation, known as
Read the full article…PwC: using ‘competitiveness’ as crowbar to lobby for mining cos
From Fools’ Gold: Recently we wrote an article entitled The Ideologists of the Competitiveness Agenda, in which we fingered the Big Four firm of accountants as among the most important vectors for the general idea that countries simply have to ‘compete’ in certain ways: namely, to shower goodies at wealthy people and multinationals, for fear that they’ll relocate elsewhere. As we’ve often
Read the full article…KPMG: Professional Chameleons Or Independent Public Auditors And Regulators?
A new guest blog by Atul K. Shah, Senior Lecturer, Suffolk Business School, University Campus Suffolk, UK. This is based on a paper Shah first presented at a Tax Justice Network Research Workshop at City University in June 2015, and it follows a more focused piece last month calling for a probe into KPMG: a call that was cited in the Financial
Read the full article…Taiwan – the un-noticed Asian tax haven?
This is a speculative blog based initially on a couple of conversations with people in the industry, with some supporting evidence. A (slightly tidied-up) conversation we’ve just had went along these lines: “You’ll never guess what is the new Switzerland for Asia. And I mean big time. The Asian money is heading there. Banks set up there as its a financial centre that doesn’t tax foreigners. And
Read the full article…The Finance Curse: Britain and the World Economy, new paper
We’ve pointed to a draft of this before, but here is the final published version, in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, a paper by two TJNers and Duncan Wigan of the Copenhagen Business School. (It’s also available here.) The abstract goes like this: The Global Financial Crisis placed the utility of financial services in question. The crash, great recession,
Read the full article…Cartoon of the day – on innovation
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Europe’s Anti Tax Avoidance Package: adding fuel to the fire?
The European Commission has announced: “The European Commission has today opened up a new chapter in its campaign for fair, efficient and growth-friendly taxation in the EU with new proposals to tackle corporate tax avoidance. The Anti Tax Avoidance Package calls on Member States to take a stronger and more coordinated stance against companies that seek to avoid paying their
Read the full article…TJN calls for public country by country reporting. A few hours later . . .
This morning Alex Cobham, TJN’s Director of Research, called for public country-by-country reporting, in an interview with the BBC’s flagship Today programme (19:20ish). “Country-by-country reporting: that was actually a Tax Justice Network proposal, going back to our establishment in 2003; but the key to it is for that information to be public: if tax authorities have it, that helps them. But
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