I worry for my children. Every parent does. I stress the word 'for'. Of course I worry about them too, but that's something different. Worrying for your children is about the situations they will face that are largely beyond their control. Worrying about them is concern for what can, within reason, be controlled. If I
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The April 2014 TaxCast from the Tax Justice Network is out. As they say of it: Forget Congress! The Taxcast looks at the latest US state to take matters into its own hands and legislate against tax havens. Also: the scandal of how the Bank for International Settlements has kept offshore private wealth data to
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You could dismiss one report in the Guardian this morning as being of minor concern. It says: The prime minister, himself a pheasant shooter and deer stalker, is understood to have intervened in December to stop a rise in the cost of a gun licence, which has been frozen at £50 since 2001 – just
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Vince Cable is trying to play tough on executive bonuses. According to press reports he’s said that either businesses must take action to curb them or the government will. It’s a pretty hollow promise for at least six reasons. First, this has been said before and nothing’s happened. Second, this comes from the government that
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According to my dictionary rentiers are defined as: What’s the relevance? It’s this: That came from the Guardian website a few minutes ago. It reminded me of something I read overnight, from US economist Dean Baker: The pharmaceutical industry … benefits from enormous rents through government granted patent monopolies. We spend more than $380 billion
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I was asked to do on interview on various aspects of the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profits Shifting (BEPS) process on Good Friday and actually gave it yesterday. In the intervening three days I had ample time to consider issues over above and beyond the subject of hybrid entities that we were meant to be
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There’s  a perverse consequence of the new rules on beneficial ownership of companies announced today.  Because the government has not adopted my recommendation that all UK banks should be required to supply information on the beneficial ownership of the companies to whom they provide banking services  but the government has, at the same time, signed
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I have already written today on the subject of the government’s proposals to create a register of the beneficial ownership of companies, something I have long campaigned for. It would, if done properly, beat con men who trade without sufficient resources, crime laundered through UK companies and a great deal of tax evasion. What I
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The government has announced today that: Measures to improve the transparency of who really owns and controls UK companies have been announced by Business Secretary Vince Cable today. Ministers have confirmed that the Government is to proceed with an open, publicly available beneficial ownership register – a G8 commitment announced by the Prime Minister in
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