I have an article on this theme in the G2 section of the Guardian this morning:
I won't reproduce the list here: it's available on the Guardian's site.
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A lovely picture of Gorey where I spent the first two years of my life, and family lived until recently. Unfortunately, I know only too well the injustice of its governance.
I made the comment : ‘Britain’s future is not in cheap goods and tax dodging. Germany sells more than us around the world even as a member of the EU. It is down to long term investment in product innovation and design, a well trained work force, long term research, sales people who can speak local languages and give good after sales service. This calls for investment by both state and the private sector. In both of those, the UK is at the bottom end of the European league.
We have chosen the American model of shareholder value maximisation with its emphasis on keeping down wages, out sourcing , lowering taxes and financial gambling (usually with other people’s money) over the model across the Channel. I am not so uninformed as to say there are no problems with that model but I think it is capable of adaptation and is the model we should follow.
”
I also note your critics ( in the comments) offer no facts or figures to refute your case.
An eleventh point about tax havens is best left unstated: the company you keep and the clients you meet.
Or never meet, except through intermediaries.
The phase we use for them is: “These men are not your friends”.
Just in case I’m not making myself perfectly clear: working in a Tax Haven will, sooner or later, involve a meeting with your client’s intermediaries, serious men who will sit down with you, and ask – politely, carefully and very clearly – for your personal assurance that all the documents were shredded.
This is, of course, mere hearsay: friends-of-friends who heard it happened to a colleague in another company, on one of those short-but-lucrative consulting contracts on an island somewhere very far away.
Actually, mostly they show you documents but will not let you take them away