June 16th, 2011
The Tax Justice Network has now collected a significant number of documents together in its
"Offshore History" page. The latest addition is a history of the emergence of the Cayman Islands as a tax haven / secrecy jurisdiction, which is
here.
The full Offshore History page currently reads as below. Comments and suggestions for additional material would be gratefully received.
Offshore History: Articles and online documents
Dec 2010 - Tax Analysts 40th anniversary commemorative book, where 50 tax folk are invited to answer the question:
What is one of the most significant changes to tax administration, practice, or...June 10th, 2011
Cross-posted, with small amendments, from the Treasure Islands blog.
A new report from
the IMF (hat tip: Markus Henn) tallies surprisingly closely, at least in part, with what members of the Task Force have been saying for some time. Take this, for example, on the role of secrecy jurisdictions (the IMF prefers the term Offshore Financial Centers, or OFCs:)
Before the 2008–09 economic crisis, many banks and hedge funds used OFCs for off-balance-sheet activities such as the so-called special purpose vehicles or structured investment vehicles. These vehicles were typically funded in onshore financial...
Continue Reading
June 9th, 2011
David Spencer, a Senior Advisor to the Tax Justice Network, has just delivered a hard-hitting speech at a major United Nations
meeting on
transfer pricing, an arcane-sounding but extraordinarily important issue in the field of international tax.
Spencer's speech is
here. It is an outspoken document, couched in diplomatic language, which contains too much important stuff for us to summarise in detail on this blog - so here is a short summary. Read the whole document for the full effect.
Companies can manipulate their internal trade ("transfer") prices...
May 23rd, 2011
From the Treasure Islands site: Naomi Rovnick of the South China Morning Post has an excellent article looking at the use by Chinese of British Virgin Islands (BVI) vehicles. It is de rigeur to be in the BVI, it seems, as one British tax lawyer says: Our clients say that you haven’t really arrived
Continue Reading
