About Nick Shaxson
New report: Chevron’s Australian tax avoidance exposed
From Public Services International: “A report released today has revealed the extent of tax avoidance undertaken by US-based oil giant, Chevron, on its largest global project – the Gorgon LNG project in Australia. The report, Chevron’s Tax Schemes: Piping profits out of Australia?, was produced by the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and endorsed by the Tax Justice Network –Australia
Read the full article…Juncker faces Euro tax committee: “disappointing and outrageous”
From Politico: “European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told a special parliamentary committee Thursday that as prime minister of Luxembourg he had no role in the country’s creation of special loopholes for multinational corporations.” This was a hearing under an ad-hoc panel on the “Luxleaks” revelations of massive corporate tax cheating operations run out of Luxembourg, with the help of cosy “tax rulings”
Read the full article…The G20/OECD BEPS Project on corporate tax: a scorecard
In 2013 the G20 world leaders mandated the OECD, a club of rich countries, for its Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project to produce reforms of international tax rules that would ensure that multinational enterprises could be taxed ‘where economic activities take place and where value is created’, and that developing countries should also be able to benefit. (We have written
Read the full article…C20: new civil society policy paper on tax justice
Adapted from the Global Alliance for Tax Justice. Organisations from 91 countries from around the world, representing close to 500 civil society organisations and almost 5,000 individuals, have been working together for the last 18 months via the Civil 20 (C20) to engage with G20 governments on some of the critical issues facing today’s world. The C20 Summit took place
Read the full article…Report: Illicit Financial Flows Outpace Foreign Aid and Investment
Updated with new table: see below From Global Financial Integrity in Washington, D.C., via email: “Analysis of illicit financial flows (IFFs) by Global Financial Integrity (GFI) shows that in seven of the last ten years the global volume of IFFs was greater than the combined value of all Official Development Assistance and Foreign Direct Investment flowing into poor nations. In
Read the full article…Holes in new OECD handbook for global financial transparency
The OECD, a club of rich countries that dominates rule-setting for global financial transparency standards, recently published a Handbook for implementing its new global tool for countries to co-operate in fighting tax evasion, known as the Common Reporting Standard (CRS). The new handbook is part of a series of milestones in the CRS’ roll-out following its initial publication in February last year,
Read the full article…Country by Country Reporting: lobbyists eviscerate OECD project
From the Uncounted blog: “The governments of G8 and G20 countries gave the OECD a global mandate to deliver country-by-country reporting, as a major tool to limit multinational corporate tax abuse, and with particular emphasis on the benefits for developing countries. New evidence shows that – even before its implementation – the OECD standard is likely to worsen existing inequalities in the international
Read the full article…Tax Haven Germany – New TJN Book
Today TJN’s Markus Meinzer publishes a book (in German) whose translated title is “Tax Haven Germany – why many rich don’t pay tax here.” Listen here to a German national radio interview this morning with the author today; also read about it in Der Spiegel (or in web English here.) The official press embargo is next Friday, Sept 18th. The book’s blurb reads: “Tax havens were always elsewhere – Alpine valleys and Caribbean
Read the full article…Russia’s offshore financial nexus, threatening financial stability and security
We have for years remarked on the role of the offshore system in promoting financial instability, not least for its propensity to enable financial players to get out from under financial regulations they don’t like, then taking the cream from risky activities and shifting the risks onto others. Now, from Izabella Kaminska at FT Alphaville: “Where did Russia’s 2014 crisis really
Read the full article…Offshore whistleblowers Deltour, Gibaud, nominated for Sakharov prize
From the European Parliament: “Three whistle-blowers: Edward Snowden, a computer expert who worked as a contractor for the US National Security Agency and leaked details of its mass surveillance programmes to the press; Antoine Deltour, a former Price Waterhouse Coopers auditor who revealed secret tax rulings with multinational companies in Luxembourg to journalists; and Stéphanie Gibaud who uncovered tax evasion
Read the full article…Tax havens and Promontory Financial Group: a “safe pair of hands?”
Now this presumably relates at least in part to this recent episode: what the New York Times calls: TweetShare
Will Brazil’s “CPMF” financial transactions tax live another day?
For the decade that lasted up to 2007, Brazil levied a tax on financial transactions called the CPMF. It was a biggy: this tax raised nearly $20 billion in its last year of operation before it was killed off by a coalition of people opposed to it, some of whom are in this photo. The tax had two main purposes: first, raising revenue; and second, affecting
Read the full article…Urry: “offshoring and democracy are in direct conflict.”
From a useful long review of John Urry’s book Offshoring, which was published a year ago and tackles issues close to us: “Whether it is the work of capital or governments, ‘offshoring and democracy are in direct conflict’ . Urry wisely refuses to entertain the idea that offshoring’s antipathy to regulation represents the promise of freedom. Offshoring in itself has no
Read the full article…Quote of the day: a tectonic shift in accounting standards
Yesterday we received an email containing our quote of the day: “this decades-overdue accounting rule is a historic development of tectonic proportions. It will enable analyses never before possible and vividly tie the opportunity costs of economic development to other public priorities.“ Our emphasis added. We wrote about this recently, but thought we’d underline its importance, with this quote. This comes from
Read the full article…Quote of the day – Scottish land owned via tax havens
Our quote of the day comes from Jen Stout, from the Scottish Land Action Movement: “We have to ask how it can be possible that vast swathes of our land in Scotland are registered in secretive tax havens. Land is a fundamental resource, not some speculative asset for the super-rich.” Which is a very fair question indeed. The whole article is
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