The BBC has reported that:
Formula One superstar Lewis Hamilton is to move to Switzerland to escape the excessive public and media attention he has had in Britain over the last year.
Which must take the award for the most gullible interpretation of a press release issued this year.
The guys gone into tax exile at 22.
How sad. [...]
Brendan Barber, the TUC General Secretary, has written a piece for the Guardian on Capital Gains Tax.
He has made some adept comments, including:
There has long been a boilerplate complaint from business that the British government’s tax regime is too complicated. Comparisons are made between the number of pages in the standard tax manuals of 1997 [...]
Sometimes someone covers a story in a way that you don’t think you can better. Dennis Howlett has done so on Ernst & Young’s role in Walmart’s aggressive tax abuse in the US. He wrote the following, which I reproduce with his permission:
Courtesy of Francine McKenna, I came across a link to this press release [...]
Nick Mathiason of the Observer has been in Zambia looking at the issue of tax not paid by that countries copper industry. In doing so he builds on excellent work by Christina Aid in this area, to which I made a small contribution.
His report is well worth reading, but perhaps most telling is this comment:
We [...]
On Friday the Isle of Man confirmed the story trailed here on 16 October that its tax system, which it claimed complied with the requirements of the EU Code of Conduct for Business Taxation, has failed to secure the approval of the European Commission. As the Isle of Man press release on the issue said:
The [...]
After a week away, and off the web, it’s amazing to come back to good news.
There’s none better than the decision of the European Parliament’s Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee to defer approval of IFRS 8, again. Only Accountancy Age has reported this, but it was on the Committee’s agenda for 22 October, as a [...]
I noted recently one of the absurd claims made by KPMG in their recent report on tax and CSR.
There are more. Take this from paragraph 6.3:
Secondly, unlike most business arrangements, the payment of tax and the quantum of the liability are to a large extent not matters of choice. There may be circumstances where tax [...]
The BBC had an excellent article on India’s currently highly volatile stock market last week. It’s worth reading in full, but some things stood out. Take this:
Over the past two months, India’s stock exchanges have been witnessing an unprecedented bull run. Much of this boom has been fuelled by foreign investors who have pumped in [...]
I’ve been giving the recent KPMG paper on tax and CSR a more thorough read. It’s made me think a lot, but as usual with KPMG publications my thoughts have flowed along two themes.
The first is what it does not say, on which there’s enough to write a small book. I might just get around [...]
I like this sticker designed to be attached to standard issue economics text books:
I also believe this is true:
I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.- Paul Samuelson
I’ve been writing one for twenty five years. Some say I should finish it.
