About Nick Shaxson
Graph of the day: the broken U.S. tax system
From Oxfam America’s new report Broken at the Top: How America’s dysfunctional tax system costs billions in corporate tax dodging: Now read on. TweetShare
Finance ministers: “hammer blow against tax evasion” – or a feather-swipe?
. . . with new updates, April 18th The Finance Ministers of Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain have announced a new plan to share information about the beneficial ownership of companies, trusts, foundations and other structures, complementing existing efforts by the OECD (the Common Reporting Standard) to create a global system for sharing banking information. UK Chancellor [Finance Minister] George
Read the full article…Trove of secret Swiss bank data released to European countries: now use it!
Back in 2014 Reuters reported, in a pre-echo of the Panama scandal: “Authorities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia [NRW] have bought a CD containing data about several thousand German clients of a Swiss bank, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag said on Sunday without citing its sources.” And this wasn’t the only one: already in 2013, half a dozen of
Read the full article…Area more than three times the size of Greater London owned in UK by secret companies in offshore tax havens
From Global Witness (no further comment from us is needed): Area more than three times the size of Greater London owned by secret companies in offshore tax havens An area of British land more than three times the size of Greater London is owned by secret companies in offshore jurisdictions like the British Virgin Islands, Global Witness revealed today based on
Read the full article…Taxing tax havens – Foreign Affairs article
TJN Senior Adviser James S. Henry has an article in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs entitled Taxing Tax Havens: How to Respond to the Panama Papers. It makes the point, as we have, that the tax havens are about so much more than tax, and then adds that much of the wealth supposedly stashed in these places is actually not there.
Read the full article…If you’re in Washington, D.C. on April 14th . . .
From the Institute for International Economic Policy: Thursday, April 14th, 2016 5:30 – 8:30 PM Harry Harding Auditorium, Room 213 Elliott School of International Affairs 1957 E Street NW, Washington, D.C. The Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University is pleased to host a special film screening, book release, and panel discussion on global tax reform on
Read the full article…The Panama papers are not about tax
Update: see TJN writer in UK’s Prospect Magazine making this general point. This deliberately provocative headline is of course not fully true: tax is clearly a tremendously important aspect of the Panama papers scandal, as it continues to roil governments and élites and their advisers, around the globe. But there are far too many commentators who seem to be putting this into a ‘tax’ pigeonhole.
Read the full article…Mossack Fonseca: why so few American clients? (Hold the conspiracy theories)
There has been a lot of buzz about one aspect of the Panama Papers: why have so few U.S. citizens been exposed in these leaks? Panama was set up originally as a country – and as a tax haven — with the help of U.S. financial interests, and it has been substantially within the U.S. orbit (mainly with the purpose of keeping
Read the full article…Panama papers help the world wake up to Tax Haven USA
We’re heartened to see that the Tax Haven USA story — one that we seem to have helped breathe new life into with this blog in January last year, and our subsequent USA report, coming into the mainstream, helped by the Panama Papers. There are many, many stories out there now, including a comment article in yesterday’s Financial Times from today’s TJN blogger, entitled Panama is only one head
Read the full article…The Panama papers – in case you missed it
The big offshore story of the moment is a new leak of 11 million documents from the Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca. The leak was originally to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, was shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and involves over 100 news organisations from around the world. This is the biggest offshore data leak in history (by far): 2.6 terabytes
Read the full article…Guest blog: how the European Trade secrets Directive will silence tax whistleblowers
From Corporate Observatory Europe, the basic background for our guest blog: “The proposed EU legislation on “Trade Secrets Protection”, which the European Parliament will vote next April 14, creates excessive rights to secrecy for businesses: it is a direct threat to the work of journalists and their sources, whistleblowers, employees’ freedom of expression, and rights to access public interest information.” Now Antonio
Read the full article…Take action to back corporate transparency in Europe
Update: see the report in The Guardian here; see Alex Cobham’s mode detailed analysis of the failures of what’s being proposed, here. We’ve been campaigning on so-called country by country reporting since 2003, and now world leaders, and many others, are beginning to introduce changes to bring this basic transparency measure for multinational corporations to life. The website endsecrecy.eu has a new
Read the full article…Why is the CEO of IKEA Switzerland head of a UN panel on gender?
On March the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment held their inaugural meeting. The panel: “intends to put women’s economic empowerment at the top of the international agenda, including by defining actions to speed up progress under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” Gender responses and gender impact are clearly seen as key ways to anchor the success of the UN’s Sustainable
Read the full article…Scottish Government announces historic law to end secrecy of land ownership
This topic has been building slowly in some countries, whose economies are blighted by the fact that large tracts of real estate are owned by anonymous entities and arrangements, typically linked to tax havens. We’d highlight Private Eye’s searchable database of offshore-owned properties in the UK — and in this particular case the indefatigable Scottish land and transparency campaigner Andy Wightman. His
Read the full article…Indonesia’s corrupt tax amnesty – how many will follow?
From Reuters: “Business may be about to look up for the [wealth management] industry helped by President Joko Widodo’s tax amnesty plan that could encourage rich Indonesians to declare assets previously concealed from the authorities, either at home or abroad.” So Indonesia is contemplating a tax amnesty. It’s not in place yet, but some sort of announcement is expected next month. We
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