I attended the first hearing of the Treasury Select Committee on Offshore Financial Centres this morning. It was to this committee that we submitted Tax Havens: Creating Turmoil.
The session started well when John McFall, the committee chairman, quoting from Creating Turmoil, as referred to in the Observer on Sunday, asked the panel their first question, […]
The FT has reported that ten years after the creation of PricewaterhouseCoopers its new senior partner:
PwC, the professional services group, must become more agile if it wants to maintain and improve on its market-leading position, according to its new head, Ian Powell.
There is a problem with that. Whenever accountancy firms have been agile abuse has […]
It was good to be in the Netherlands yesterday at the conference of the Tax Justice Network in that country.
What was so good about the event was that the event did not just attract TJN people, or those from the support organisations with which we are often associated, such as development agencies (although it was […]
All blog owners like to look at their visitor statistics every now and again. the one who denies this is a liar.
I noticed something curious when I did so recently. It seems that the four most popular articles on this blog are (in order):
Yet more misinformation from PWC
PWC’s Total Tax Oversight
PWC’s Total Tax - the […]
As Prem Sikka says in the Guardian:
The subprime crisis should teach us to keep a much closer eye on company auditors from now on
As he notes:
On February 27 2008, Carlyle Capital Corporation published its annual accounts for the year to December 31 2007. These accounts were audited by the Guernsey office of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world’s […]
The BBC has reported that:
Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC), a unit of the private equity firm Carlyle Group, has said it will not be able to meet lenders’ demands for money. The US mortgage-backed bond fund will collapse if, as expected, its lenders seize its remaining assets. CCC’s problems are the latest sign of the credit […]
John Whiting of PricewaterhouseCoopers has told the BBC:
It has an image of being secretive but it is major financial centre. An awful lot of extremely reputable business goes on there
Well he would say that, of course. His firm is there. But what is it that you do there exactly John? And why does a legitimate […]
Liechtenstein is tiny: it is 15 miles long, has a population of under 35,000 and one main town. It’s existence is effectively the consequence of a bad real estate deal by the Holy Roman Empire in the 18th century; it became a sovereign state in the 19th century. But that’s a joke. Even its so-called […]
Prem Sikka has a knack of hitting nails on the head. His latest Guardian piece looks at the relationship between the state and accountancy firms. As he puts it:
There is something very odd about the way UK governments deal with administrative failures. In earlier times, rulers called upon obedient high-priests to manage their crises. In […]
Dennis has waded into this debate.
And he can see no more merit in PWC’s TTC than I can. As he put it:
[Do] PwC think we’re all idiots? A year 1 CIMA student could work out just how appallingly illogical this argument really is.
The sadness in all this is that well meaning people are being hood […]
