Links Jan 16
The time is now: European Parliament to vote on the Anti-Money Laundering Directive Eurodad See also: Member states split on proposed transparency for trusts legislation IFC Review / European Voice TweetShare
Links Jan 14
“BEPS Action Plan: Update on 2014 Deliverables”- Live Webcast Thursday 23 January OECD Hellenic EU Presidency Outlines Priorities Tax-News “Greece will press for the extension of automatic information exchange procedures as part of its six month European Union (EU) Presidency.” TweetShare
Jersey: A Case Study in Path Dependence
This blog is part of a series highlighting the narrative reports from a number of secrecy jurisdictions around the world, explaining how they became offshore financial centres. Jersey ranked ninth on the 2013 Financial Secrecy Index. TweetShare
Offshore Corporate Profits: The Only Thing ‘Trapped’ Is Tax Revenue
From the Center for American Progress (hat tip: AABA), in the context of news reports of trillions of dollars in U.S. overseas profits “trapped” overseas, just waiting to be invested in the struggling U.S. economy – if only it could somehow be “unlocked” (such as through a corporate tax amnesty.) Our quote of the day: “There is something trapped on the balance sheets
Read the full article…Just Money: how society can break the power of finance
From Commonwealth publishing: An e-book by the acclaimed economist Ann Pettifor, Just Money: How We Can Break the Despotic Power of Finance. In it she explores the role of credit in the economy and its relationship with the money supply. She goes on to set out a set of policies to bring the economy back under substantial democratic control. This
Read the full article…Quote of the day: fracking tax positions
From David Quentin’s Tax and Law blog, just mentioned in our Links: Vodafone’s 2013 “Tax Risk Management Strategy” paper, for example, concedes in its small print that Vodafone happily adopts filing positions which “will not meet the more-likely-than-not standard but would still be tenable”. If the mining of tax risk may be understood in extractive terms, a policy of habitually adopting merely
Read the full article…Architect behind Eurozone’s biggest tax haven wants to be EC president
This is a very dangerous development. From Euractiv: “Former Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU’s longest-serving elder statesman, threw his hat into the ring yesterday (9 January) for the presidency of the European Commission to succeed José Manuel Barroso. TweetShare
Links Jan 10
How the tax profession and business reacted to the wider tax avoidance debate in 2013 David Quentin’s tax & law blog TweetShare
The twilight of the international tax consensus
That’s the headline of a provocative article by U.S. rock star tax expert Lee Sheppard, TweetShare
Do tax cuts promote growth? Part MCXIV
The world’s economists have been arguing over this question for decades. Which is odd, because the evidence is rather clear on this point. TweetShare
Links Jan 9
Tell Barclays To Clean Up its Act ActionAid The G20 and the taxing issue of making big business pay The Conversation TweetShare
New report: how Finnish multinationals use tax havens
Our partners at Finnwatch have just published an important new report looking at the activity of Finnish multinational corporations in tax havens. TweetShare
If Ireland is not a tax haven, what is it? A bagel?
From the Treasure Islands blog, reposted with permission. Ireland continues to annoy me. Not Ireland the country, of course: it’s just the tax haven industry that has grown upthere. It annoys me because there are so many influential voices there that deny Ireland is a tax haven. All tax havens deny being tax havens, but Ireland seems to have taken it to
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