According to elite state agents Knight Frank the rich are getting richer, and are in London: London has been home to more of the ultra-rich than any other city for the past three years (4,364 in 2014), with New York in second place. London should still be in the top spot 10 years from now,
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Jolyn Maugham has provided an excellent analysis of the Court of Appeal decision in the Ingenious case. His analysis is more interesting though. As he says: There is a world of difference between HMRC recognising that there is no legal impediment to it acting in the public interest by enhancing transparency – and HMRC actually acting
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Some good work by Transparency International in the UK is reported by the FT today. As the FT notes: The secrecy surrounding foreign owners of high-value London properties has long given rise to suspicions of hidden corruption and money-laundering. Now an analysis of official data has shown that more than 40,000 London properties are held
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The FT has noted today that India is introducing tough new laws on tax haven abusers as a reaction to the HSBC scandal. In a sense this is odd. For a long time the story in India was its refusal to engage with the fact that this data existed and to even formally request a
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This email arrived this afternoon: ———— Public Accounts Committee Informal note to the media Subject: Tax avoidance and evasion: HSBC The Committee has decided to call the following witnesses to give further evidence to this inquiry: Monday 9th March (Committee Room to be confirmed) At 3.15pm: Stuart Gulliver                                                   Chief Executive, HSBC Holdings plc (confirmed) Chris
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As the FT reports this morning: Northern Ireland’s devolved government faces its biggest overhaul in 15 years as politicians and officials brace for the arrival of long-delayed public spending cuts. Those cuts are the price Northern Ireland has to pay to introduce the tax competition that its politicians wish for with the Republic of Ireland.
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Edmund Phelps was the 2006 Nobel laureate in Economics and is director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. He argues in the FT this morning that the: slowdown [in European growth] resulted from narrowing innovation. Even in the postwar years, innovation in Europe was feeble by past standards. In the 1960s, it
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As Economia magazine, and many others, have noted: The majority of the British public thinks it is unacceptable to avoid paying tax, according to a new poll by YouGov In total, 59% of the UK public thinks that tax avoidance is morally wrong, making no distinction between avoidance practices and illegal tax evasion. Only 32%
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The East Coast main line was privatised, again, yesterday. After five years in public ownership, in which it was one of only two train franchises to make a positive contribution to the UK Exchequer,  paying a total of £1 billion to the Treasury during that period, it was let to Virgin and Stagecoach. I am
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