{"id":14481,"date":"2012-03-07T12:07:19","date_gmt":"2012-03-07T12:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=14481"},"modified":"2012-03-07T12:07:19","modified_gmt":"2012-03-07T12:07:19","slug":"vodafone-switzerland-and-the-part-time-book-keeper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2012\/03\/07\/vodafone-switzerland-and-the-part-time-book-keeper\/","title":{"rendered":"Vodafone, Switzerland and the part time book-keeper"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Bureau of Investigative\u00a0Journalism\u00a0has reported today<\/a> that:<\/p>\n

Vodafone\u2019s accounts suggest it attributes billions of pounds in profit to branches in the tax haven of Switzerland \u2014 but an undercover investigation indicates hardly any business is done there.<\/p>\n

An undercover operation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Private Eye has revealed that Vodafone\u2019s Swiss branches are run by a single part-time bookkeeper, indicating their main purpose is tax avoidance.<\/p>\n

In a meeting with reporters posing as consultants, Vodafone\u2019s Swiss branch manager revealed that:<\/p>\n

- He is primarily a bookkeeper;
\n- Vodafone takes up less than 5% of his time;
\n- He is not involved in decision-making but follows orders from Vodafone\u2019s Luxembourg office;
\n- Vodafone has a dedicated room in his office but it is almost always unoccupied.<\/p>\n

For one subsidiary, profits worth $2.5bn (\u00a31.6bn) were taxed at less than 1% in 2011<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n

The revelations suggest the Swiss set-up is artificial and should not escape greater scrutiny from the British taxman.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There's nothing terribly surprising about this. Remember the whole purpose of\u00a0offshore\u00a0is to record transactions that really take place\u00a0elsewhere. I explain this at some length here<\/a>. Vodafone would appear to be confirming what we already know - that offshore is just a giant accounting exercise designed to hide money from view. But it's nice to have the evidence.<\/p>\n

And if we had full\u00a0country-by-country reporting we'd also know this for sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Bureau of Investigative\u00a0Journalism\u00a0has reported today that: Vodafone\u2019s accounts suggest it attributes billions of pounds in profit to branches in the tax haven of Switzerland
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,63,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corporation-tax","category-switzerland","category-tax-avoidance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}