About Nick Shaxson
Why the Swiss case against whistleblower Elmer may hurt the bankers
Rudolf Elmer, the Cayman-based Swiss whistleblower who went to prison after spilling secrets relating to the Swiss bank Julius Baer, has long been victimised not only by the Swiss banking establishment, and Switzerland’s courts (which as we’ve extensively documented, seem to have played fast and loose with the law in order to nail him) – but also by much if not most
Read the full article…New report from UK parliament: tax justice to the fore
The UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on Tax has published a report entitled A more responsible global tax system or a ‘sticking plaster’? An examination of the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) process and recommendations. They consulted us (among many others) and the result is a really strong document of tax justice, with significance for all countries, since Britain
Read the full article…Finally, trade misinvoicing gets political
We recently helped publicise a report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in our blog entitled Some countries “lose” 2/3 of exports to misinvoicing. As a reminder, trade misinvoicing is a form of money laundering that involves deliberately misreporting (on an invoice to customs) the value of a commercial transaction, so as to shift money illictly across borders. The study seeks to get
Read the full article…Tax cuts and prosperity: new US evidence
Updated with an additional story From the New York Times: “How can America’s leaders foster broad prosperity? For most Republicans — including Donald J. Trump — the main answer is to “cut and extract”: Cut taxes and business regulations, including pesky restrictions on the extraction of natural resources, and the economy will boom. Mr. Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan are
Read the full article…Finance Curse in The Atlantic: how to mount an offshore coup
We recently hosted Brooke Harrington, an Associate Professor at the Copenhagen Business School, on our Taxcast, talking about her remarkable research on tax havens. She wrote an article in The Atlantic last October, entitled Inside the Secretive World of Tax-Avoidance Experts – which we’d urge you to read if you haven’t already – and now she’s followed it up with another equally powerful article,
Read the full article…Will the OECD tax haven blacklist be another whitewash?
Finance Ministers from the G20 countries meet in China on July 23-24 – this weekend. Amid sessions that will focus heavily on Brexit-related issues, there will be an important tax component. At their previous meeting they mandated the OECD to “establish objective criteria . . . to identify non-cooperative jurisdictions with respect to tax transparency.” A blacklist, in other words. TweetShare
Guest blog: involve developing countries more in international tax co-operation
After Panama: developing countries need to be involved more closely in international co-operation on tax issues A guest blog by Christian von Haldenwang, German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) Bonn, July 4, 2016 – Two major mechanisms squeeze the tax base in developing and emerging countries. Rich individuals evade their tax obligations by moving money abroad and submitting false statements regarding
Read the full article…Some countries “lose” 2/3 of exports to misinvoicing
From UNCTAD, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, via email: “Some commodity dependent developing countries are losing as much as 67% of their exports worth billions of dollars to trade misinvoicing, according to a fresh study by UNCTAD, which for the first time analyses this issue for specific commodities and countries. Trade misinvoicing is thought to be one
Read the full article…New questions over Juncker’s role in Amazon Luxembourg affair
Jean-Claude, Juncker, the President of the European Commission, has long tried to distance himself from his role as one of the key architects of Luxembourg’s crime-fueled tax haven factory. An excellent new investigation by Newsweek now reminds us of his efforts to display whiter-than-white credentials: “It’s the tax authorities that develop the specific rules that are applied,” [Juncker] said last September during a hearing of
Read the full article…New tax justice platform in Spain
From the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, on June 28: “On June 28th , Madrid saw the presentation ceremony of the Spanish Plataforma por la Justicia Fiscal (Platform for Tax Justice),an alliance of public organizations, trade unions, social movements, NGOs and others society civil groups. The Platform considers that “the actual tax situation of the country is unacceptable because it
Read the full article…Luxembourg backing down on supporting tax haven USA
A month ago we wrote an article entitled Now Luxembourg, Switzerland are working to bolster Tax Haven USA. This concerns a global scheme to share banking information, the OECD-led Common Reporting Standard, (CRS, which starts up next year and complements separate schemes and campaigns to see public disclosure of the beneficial owners of entities and arrangements like trusts and companies.) In a nutshell, under
Read the full article…Top tax expert: Big 4 “accountants of fortune” must be broken up
In March The Economist magazine rang alarm bells (again) about a rise in concentrated market power: a problem where the biggest firms get ever bigger and more like monopolies, making it easy to extract wealth from the rest of us (as opposed to creating wealth.) This, in turn fosters steeper inequality and poverty and reduces economic growth. As they put it: “High profits across a whole economy can be a sign of sickness.
Read the full article…UN calls UK to account over impact of unjust tax laws
A United Nations body has called on the single largest financial secrecy jurisdiction in the world – the United Kingdom and its Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies – to account for the human rights impacts of its unjust tax policies at home and abroad. The call was issued by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which oversees
Read the full article…New EU Directive on Money Laundering – a curate’s egg
The European Union, amid all the Brexit turmoil, has issued a proposal for a new Directive on money laundering and terrorist financing. Transparency, of course, is at the core of it. The Panama Papers scandal has given new urgency to the task of unmasking the corrupt, the crooks and other financial miscreants, and it’s clear that business supports us: in a survey
Read the full article…Anti-tax, anti-regulation sirens already emerging after Brexit
Just before the Brexit vote we quoted Adam Posen, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, about what might happen in a post-Brexit Britain: “If you’re anti-regulation fantasists to begin with, you start going down the path, ‘Oh we can become an even more offshore center. We can become the Cayman Islands writ large, or Panama writ large.’ And this
Read the full article…
