Much of this is straight hype.
But it also highlights how a state like Germany is tough on evasion by individuals and light on avoidance by multinational corporations.
The duality is unacceptable.
As is the role of Malta - which I've always understood to have been designed by at least one member of the Big 4.
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Richard,
I agree that much of this is hype. The article’s merit though I believe is highlighting and painting a portrait of how the “tax avoidance industry” works and that it is truely operating on a scale of an industry – an idea I seldom came across in mainstream media. I wrote a commenting blog in the German TJN-Blog about this article here:
http://steuergerechtigkeit.blogspot.com/2009/09/steueroase-deutschland.html
An important omission of this article though is that it fails to explain how and why Germany is a tax haven used by foreigners! Unfortunately, it thus repeats the wrong notion that a tax haven caters to domestic clients while in our concept of secrecy jurisdiction it is clear that the intention of tax haven status is to create benefits of use only to those not resident. Therefore, it does not really make a point why Germany is indeed a secrecy jurisdiction.
For instance the article leaves out that Germany only exchanges information in tax matters with countries whom have signed a bilateral double tax avoidance treaty, hence those countries, who have given privileges to German investors. Second, Germany applies unilaterally the exemption method in the taxation of foreign profits which fuels a tax rate race to the bottom in the rest of the world. These are, in my view, probably the most important ways in which Germany displays traits of a secrecy jurisdiction.