About Nick Shaxson
Selling England by the offshore pound: astonishing new interactive map
Britain’s Private Eye newspaper has produced the most astonishing map of offshore landholdings in England. If you live in England, you can browse your local area and find out which properties near you are owned offshore. (Perhaps you might want to pop out and ask them why.) As Private Eye flag it: “The map shows all land and property registered in
Read the full article…Why tax havens will be at the heart of the next financial crisis
Update: this has now been cross-posted at Naked Captalism This post examines another excellent in-depth investigation by Reuters into global financial stability issues, and the role of tax havens in this giant game of pain and plunder. The investigation uncovers, among other things, a whole lot of offshore shenanigans, complementing what we (and relatively few others) have been saying for some years
Read the full article…As the murk grows, the UK rows back on money laundering checks
Updated with Cayman-related news. From Global Witness, a new report entitled Banks and Dirty Money: How the financial system enables state looting at a devastating human cost. It’s got plenty of detail, but one eye-catcher is their look at the largest penalties given for money-laundering or sanctions violations. In the U.K. the maximum slap on the wrist penalty is £8.75 million (about US$13.5 million). In
Read the full article…New report: anticipating tax wars in Southeast Asia
From the Fools’ Gold blog: We’ve sometimes used the term ‘tax wars’ instead of ‘tax competition’ to describe the process by which countries try to tempt mobile capital by offering tax breaks, prompting others to follow suit in a race to the bottom. Countries often do this in the name of ‘tax competitiveness,’ which as we’ve shown is generally a fools’
Read the full article…Taxing Money Madness – now is the perfect time for FTT/Robin Hood tax
Taxing Money Madness — Why This Is A Perfect Time for a Robin Hood Levy on Financial Transactions A guest blog for TJN by James S. Henry If ever there was a perfect time to revisit the proposal to adopt a so-called “Robin Hood tax” (AKA the “financial transactions tax,” or the “Tobin tax“) and make it global, this is it. In the
Read the full article…No, tax isn’t lawful extortion (or theft)
Updated with Chris Giles’ response. Sigh. If we had a penny for each time we heard this . . . This claim is often associated with the U.S. libertarians, but this time it’s Chris Giles, a respected commentator in the Financial Times, in an article entitled How to be hard left without being stupid. It’s about the rise of Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn as
Read the full article…Our Spanish language podcast: Justicia ImPositiva, Edición 1
Justicia ImPositiva, Edición 1 del nuevo podcast de Tax Justice Network/Red de Justicia Fiscal En este mes de agosto 2015: desvelamos las estrategias de los países poderosos para continuar manteniendo un sistema tributario que beneficie a las grandes corporaciones. ¿Sabías que al menos 26 bancos europeos transfieren sus beneficios a paraísos fiscales a través de sus sucursales? ¿Funcionara la nueva
Read the full article…The West African Tax Giveaway: new report
An important joint report has been published by TJN-Africa and Actionaid looking at corporate tax incentives and their impact in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) — and in particular Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal. The report’s first finding is that: I. Corporate tax incentives – reductions in tax offered by governments presumably to attract investment – significantly reduce domestic revenue collection
Read the full article…The Tax Justice Network podcast, August 2015
In the August 2015 Tax Justice Network Podcast: Sun, sea and tax: the Taxcast goes to Mexico and looks at how multinational tourism operates there. Plus: we ask why Luxembourg is printing euros like there’s no tomorrow; whether Brazil’s offer of a tax amnesty to its tax dodgers will work; and how much longer ‘emerging economies’ and other countries left
Read the full article…Islands (the play): the conversation shifts
From the subtitle of an article in The UK’s Guardian newspaper by Caroline Horton about her play Islands, a dark skewering of tax havens which has been significantly inspired by by TJN’s work. “The appalling reviews for our show about tax havens led me to wonder if I’d ever work again. But then the conversation shifted.” TweetShare
Guest post: time for a grown-up debate about corporate welfare
A guest post by Kevin Farnsworth, Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of York. He recently published work on corporate welfare in the UK, which attracted a lot of attention (and some criticism.) Here is his response, which was originally posted at Speri, and is cross-posted here, with thanks. The purpose of my report into, British corporate welfare, which featured
Read the full article…Coming soon: the first Spanish language Taxcast
We generally don’t post non-English language articles, but this is a flyer for the launch of TJN’s first Spanish-language Taxcast, so we’ll break with tradition for this blog. An English translation is below, in any case. Nuevo: Tax Justice Network (Red de Justicia Fiscal) podcast en Castellano, por favor difundir a través de todas tus redes. Nuestro podcast mensual en Inglés
Read the full article…The ALEC rankings: does smaller government mean higher growth?
This post originally appeared at Fools’ Gold, a TJN-supported site about “competitiveness”. There are a lot of ‘competitiveness’-related rankings of countries and states out there, from the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, to the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings. (We’ll address some of these in due course.) It’s interesting to note, for starters, that the highly taxed, highly
Read the full article…Tracking corporate tax breaks: a welcome new form of transparency emerges in the U.S.
Cross-posted with Fools’ Gold: Across the world, corporations are showered with tax breaks and other inducements in the name of ‘competitiveness.’ In most cases these tax breaks don’t affect investment decisions in any way. They are pure giveaways. In many countries it’s been hard to track the scale and extent of these giveaways, although recently we reported on one such effort by
Read the full article…Global tax body: “After 3 days of bullying, developing countries were run over”
The Third International Conference on Financing for Development just held in Addis Ababa has held negotiations for an internationally agreed position to support the post-2015 development agenda. One of the key areas of dispute this year was international tax. More specifically, TJN and others have pushing for years for international tax rule-making to be removed from the clutches of the world’s rich countries, and developing
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