About Nick Shaxson
Offshore Wrapper #52 – a year in tax justice
Gulliver’s circuitous travels More details of HSBC account holders continue to emerge. The latest embarrassing tale concerns Stuart Gulliver, the CEO of the godawful bank. Born in Derby, England, and educated in lush, leafy Devon, he now works in London. But despite his obvious English roots, Gulliver is reportedly registered as non-domiciled for tax purposes in the UK. It is
Read the full article…Fact of the day: how often has Britain’s ‘non-dom’ rule been challenged?
Britain’s domicile rule is one of the greatest tools available to the world’s wealthiest people to shake of the pesky burden of tax, leaving the rest of us to kindly pay their share for them. It’s a slippery, vague concept, and lots of people who claim domicile status really ought not to be able to. With this short background, here’s our factoid of
Read the full article…How the ‘competitiveness’ dogma made banks corrupt
We’ve come across an interview in The Atlantic with Stephen Platt, an expert on financial crime prevention, contained in an article entitled How Dirty Money Gets Into Banks. As much as anything, we’ve taken it as an excuse to reproduce this fabulous cartoon in Britain’s Private Eye magazine, which rather speaks for itself in the wake of the HSBC scandal (see TJN’s “high grade
Read the full article…The Tax justice Network’s February 2015 Podcast
Just what does a bank have to do to lose its licence?! We look at the fall out from #HSBCLeaks and ask how can we genuinely tackle criminality in global finance? Also: the latest research on fines and crimes in banking; why a recent threat to have UK Crown Dependencies and Overseas territories blacklisted won’t exactly have them shaking in
Read the full article…Settling accounts: what happens after SwissLeaks?
From Koen Roovers, re-posted from Open Democracy: Settling accounts: what happens after SwissLeaks? By Koen Roovers, Financial Transparency Coalition A major leak of incriminating HSBC records last week resulted in print and television news coverage around the globe, trended on Twitter for several days and prompted several governments to start long-anticipated investigations. TweetShare
How to deal with the likes of HSBC
We’re going to quote from an article in 2012 by Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone magazine, which was examining the latest HSBC mega-scandal of the time. He was outraged, as we all should be, at the lightness of the sentencing in a case that had involved shifting money for the massacre-happy Mexican Sinaloa cartel, for groups linked to Al Qaeda; for Russian gangsters; and also
Read the full article…New official warning: too much finance is bad for your economy
This is devastating. The Economist has just picked up on an issue that is at the core of TJN’s Finance Curse analysis, with a new article entitled Warning: too much finance is bad for the economy. It notes: “One of the biggest political issues in recent years has been that Wall Street has done better than Main Street. That is not just a populist slogan. A
Read the full article…How much wealth does the median household have?
Forgive us for another UK-focused blog today, but there’s a lot of British sleaze about at the moment. In this one we are going to highlight a graph, courtesy of the Bank of England (p10 here), which rather speaks for itself. Courtesy of David Quentin. Yes, yes, this ignores housing wealth and so on. But still. And the reasons for this shabby
Read the full article…The “Miracle of Minneapolis” and a local ceasefire in tax wars
From The Atlantic in the U.S., an article entitled “The Miracle of Minneapolis” which looks at the demonstrable outperformance of this mid-sized U.S. city, in terms of being a good place to live. It’s summed up in an old adage: ‘It’s really hard to get people to move to Minneapolis, and it’s impossible to get them to leave.’ The lure of
Read the full article…HSBC scandal latest: how the bank captured a British newspaper
The article by Oborne, for those interested in Britain or keen to understand one of the tools that financial institutions use in ‘capturing’ the minds of the general public, it is well worth reading in its own right. It’s devastating. The Telegraph, we should add, is owned by two very peculiar wealthy brothers, the Barclay Brothers, who have a long
Read the full article…We’d go to prison for this! Petition for tax justice
Please, everyone, sign this Avaaz petition: HSBC bank has just been caught red-handed helping some of the world’s mega-rich dodge taxes! We’d go to prison for this, but governments are treating these powerful people like they’re too big to jail. Let’s show them they’re not. TweetShare
Tweet of the day – London as the front office for global tax avoidance
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HSBC, tax evasion and the link to lax financial regulation
Two quotes of the day, both from an article by Prof. Bill Black, a former U.S. bank regulator: “Taxes were once termed the price we paid for civilization, but they now represent the price the wealthy brag to each other about refusing to pay as they pillage civilization.” Quite so. And then, in the following sentence: “Because the City of
Read the full article…Jean-Claude Juncker and tax haven Luxembourg, in a picture
From Gabriel Zucman, an image enhanced by David Walch of Attac-Austria: Juncker, of course, has denied responsibility for his role in Luxembourg’s tax haven activities such as the Luxleaks scandal. In his role at the head of the European Commission it’s politically important for him to say this. But this graph, we think, tells an important story. TweetShare
Quote of the day – is this why so many bankers are rich?
The quote of the day comes from the widely read financial blog Stumbling and Mumbling, via FT Alphaville, and it goes like this: “Bankers go home with big money for the same reason zookeepers go home with shit on their boots: if there’s a lot of stuff around, some of it will stick to you.” And that could apply to offshore
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