About Nick Shaxson
How Seychelles became a paradise for dirty money and corruption
In 2012 Al Jazeera published a remarkable undercover television investigation into the Seychelles, where two African journalists posing as wealthy Zimbabweans were brazenly offered the sleaziest secrecy services. It’s a classic of offshore undercover investigation, and we at TJN have referenced it several times. Now the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has done its own in-depth investigation, referencing the
Read the full article…Quote of the day: on corporate tax policy making
From Martin Hearson: “What my clients are concerned about,” said my friend, “is political interference in corporate tax policymaking.” I found this quite startling. Is it possible that businesses consider corporate tax policy to be a matter for private negotiations between them and the government, rather than the subject of public (and even parliamentary) debate as part of the government’s
Read the full article…Tax dodging and the birth of the British Empire
As we’ve documented, the United Kingdom plays a central – if not the central – role in the modern global system of offshore tax havens, or secrecy jurisdictions. Now here’s a post from ActionAid, looking at (yet) another aspect of all this. Cross-posted, with permission. Tax dodging and the birth of Empire by Ruth Kelly, ActionAid. I’ve always thought that the East
Read the full article…Tax, corporate responsibility and human rights: new paper
From the Boston University Law Review, a paper by Jasmine Fisher entitled Fairer Shores: tax havens, tax avoidance and corporate social responsibility. Its introduction contains this: “The doctrine of corporate social responsibility provides a logical rationale for multinational corporations to adopt antiavoidance practices, in that the harm caused by tax avoidance outweighs any financial benefit that accrues from these practices.” TweetShare
Tax Justice Focus – the Human Rights edition
The latest edition of our newsletter Tax Justice Focus focuses on the theme of tax justice and human rights, perhaps the fastest-growing area of interest in the rapidly expanding global tax justice community. Click here for the full edition of Tax Justice Focus, the Human Rights edition. You can also access the individual articles below. TweetShare
The Price of Offshore Revisited – new material
We published a long rebuttal yesterday to an attack on TJN by two U.S. academics, supported by the lobbying arm of the British tax haven of Jersey, which has publicised it at a conference in London today. The attack focused quite heavily on our 2012 report The Price of Offshore Revisited, which estimated that there is some $21-32 trillion sitting offshore, substantially
Read the full article…Tax haven of Jersey to attack TJN with funded study. We respond.
June 6: updated with details of book project. Jersey Finance, the lobbying arm of the finance industry in the offshore tax haven of Jersey, tomorrow will host a media event in London attacking TJN and our estimates for the size of the offshore industry, and publicising a supposedly independent academic paper, partly funded by Jersey Finance, which also focuses heavily on
Read the full article…Cartoon: Don’t be evil? Don’t be Google
From Doonesbury, With a nod to Google’s tax avoidance schemes. Good one. More on Google’s tax avoidance and murky business here and here. And while we’re on the subject of cartoons, here’s another good one. TweetShare
The TJN app – now available in the Apple store
Recently we announced that TJN had launched a Tax Justice Network app for Android phones – your one stop mobile shop for the latest tax justice news, views and analysis. We are delighted to announce that we now have a version available for the iPhone. Find it at the iTunes store, here. Feedback so far is that it is extremely
Read the full article…Almost all Spanish multinationals use tax havens – Report
Via The Guardian: “Almost all of the 35 companies listed on the Spanish stock exchange use tax havens, according to a report from Observatorio RSC, an organisation that monitors corporate social responsibility. The figures, based on company reports for 2012, show a 31.9% increase in the use of tax havens compared with 2010, with 33 firms (94%) using them.” Read more
Read the full article…Brazilians will pay heavily for FIFA’s “obscene” tax abuses
Four years ago we wrote about FIFA’s so-called African “tax bubble” where FIFA was forcing a poor African country to forego its potential football tax revenues in order to funnel yet more money into FIFA’s gilded Zürich headquarters and its lucrative empire. We quoted Professor Han Kogels of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, who said: “They want to create their own tax
Read the full article…In 2009-10, over 98 pct of Google’s and Oracle’s subsidiaries disappeared
. . . disappeared from view, that is. From the Social Science Research Network, an academic paper from last year: “From 2009 to 2010, 98 percent of Google’s and 99 percent of Oracle’s subsidiaries disappeared from the Exhibit 21s filed with their SEC Form 10Ks. However, a March 2012 search of available public company registries revealed that at least 65
Read the full article…On the non-perils of information exchange
Update: see TJN writer Nicholas Shaxson’s Five Myths about Tax Havens, in the Washington Post, April 2016. Back in 2009 we wrote a long blog looking at tax havens’ arguments that if they give up information to countries with poor governance, all sorts of disasters will ensue. We think it’s worth re-publishing the blog in its entirety: the arguments are
Read the full article…Illicit financial flows and human rights: attention grows with new report
We’ve just written about an important report by the CESR and Christian Aid on fiscal justice and human rights, as more evidence that the world is waking up to the crucial linkages between human rights and tax and offshore abuses. Now here’s another report, a policy brief from the Hague Institute for Global Justice entitled Curbing Illicit Financial Flows: The Post-2015 Agenda
Read the full article…Stiglitz: how to use tax to build an economy
Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has just published a White Paper with the Roosevelt Institute entitled Reforming Taxation to Promote Growth and Equity. It is a fascinating and clear piece of work, distilling a number of powerful tax principles – and it includes a section on formula apportionment (or unitary taxation). We will highlight just a few things of note – most of
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