About Nick Shaxson
Tax haven buyers set off property alarm in London
Update: see Tax Research article entitled Tax haven ownership of UK property might cost £2 billion year in tax avoidance – using some of the FT data. The current top story on the Financial Times website (at least at 8am UK time) is entitled Tax haven buyers set off property alarm in England and Wales. And it begins: “At least £122bn
Read the full article…UK government on Swiss tax deal: TJN was right
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Should conservationists continue to dodge the issue of tax dodging?
That’s the headline of a useful new article published by Jonathan Hanson and David McNair in the journal Oryx (published by Fauna & Flora International), which you can download without a subscription. The short article looks at the links http://pharmacy-no-rx.net/topamax_generic.html between tax abuses and public finances and on governance, and concludes that this is an area where the conservation community
Read the full article…Tax Us If You Can – the Hebrew edition
We are delighted to announce that Tax Us If You Can, one of our flagship publications introducing and explaining tax justice, has been translated into Hebrew. It is available here, and you’ll be able to access it permanently on our reports page. The translation was written by TJN Israel at the College of Law and Business in Ramat Gan (in
Read the full article…The Spirit Level – new documentary film coming
From The Spirit Level, a tantalising trailer for a forthcoming documentary film about inequality. As they note: “The Spirit Level tells the story of how the gap between rich and poor has risen to unprecedented levels, under our noses. But does it matter? We’ve be interweaving stories from across the globe to examine how it impacts on all our lives.
Read the full article…Delaware corporate secrecy and crime: a long-awaited debate begins
A fascinating blog from Global Witness: “Last November, a former special agent for the Treasury Department, John Cassara, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times with the headline “Delaware, Den of Thieves?” Cassara described how the state of Delaware (along with Wyoming and Nevada) has become “nearly synonymous with underground financing, tax evasion and other bad deeds facilitated by anonymous shell companies”.
Read the full article…CTJ: Art Laffer’s travelling fiscal circus
From Citizens for Tax Justice in the U.S.: “It is a truism in Washington that being wrong does not preclude one from wielding influence. There are, however, some pundits who are so egregiously wrong that it boggles the mind to find policymakers taking their advice. Art Laffer is one of these pundits. Laffer, an economist most famous for developing consequential fiscal
Read the full article…Quote of the day: taxes and economic growth
From U.S. tax expert Ed Kleinbard, and his forthcoming book We are Better Than This (p159): “There is no meaning to the growth effects of taxes as such, only to fiscal policy taken as a whole.” It is another way of explaining that taxes are not a cost to an economy: they are a transfer within it. Kleinbard is alluding to
Read the full article…Top UK politician compares banking divide to African oil separation
We’ve written plenty about the similarities between a ‘resource curse‘ afflicting mineral-rich countries in Africa and elsewhere and what we have termed a ‘finance curse‘ afflicting economies that are overly dependent on the financial sector. Britain is a case in point, with offshore activity a substantial part of the sector. Now Vince Cable, the U.K.’s business secretary, has made another
Read the full article…How developing countries can take control over their tax destinies
Krishen Mehta, a Senior Adviser to TJN, has written a short document with ten pointers offering ways that developing countries can take control over their tax destinies. We reproduce the introduction of his article below: please click on the full article for the ten points. We hope to produce more of these in due course, in collaboration with other experts. How
Read the full article…How will Juncker, tax haven candidate, handle his conflicts of interest?
Next week we expect Jean-Claude Juncker, the former long-standing prime minister of Luxembourg, to be nominated to the powerful role of President of the European Commission. The man who for many years defended one of Europe’s nastiest and biggest secrecy jurisdictions (or tax havens) now faces an important question. Will he continue discreetly to find ways to represent the interests
Read the full article…Kansas/Missouri: local ceasefire in U.S. tax border war?
Last year the St. Louis Post-Despatch published an editorial entitled Missouri Senate declares class war against citizens, looking at tax subsidies being showered on businesses in an effort to lure them away from neighbouring Kansas – which, in turn, has been showering subsidies on businesses to cross the line to its side. There are probably fewer places in the world where
Read the full article…Quote of the day: opium and competitiveness
From a book called The Opium Wars, one of Britain’s less honourable (to put it mildly) historical escapades, a statement that was prompted by moves in Britain towards stopping the opium trade: “Her Majesty’s government should do nothing to place in peril our opium revenues. As for preventing the manufacturing of opium, and the sale of it in China, that
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