Financial Transparency Coalition

I reported yesterday that the zero / 10 tax regimes adopted by all three of the Crown Dependencies have failed the test set by the European Commission for compliance with the EU Code of Conduct for Business Taxation (Guernsey has failed by default). There are those who do, of course, wish to ignore the news and that is their prerogative. I admit that this is a leak, but one which I’m entirely confident is right. Failure on three out of five counts is a dramatic rejection of the deliberately abusive structure of zero...

Vanessa Houlder has written an excellent article in the Financial Times this morning on the subject of tax and reputational risk. As she notes:

One lesson for companies is clear: tax is becoming an important source of reputational risk. Increasingly, businesses are weighing up whether they are vulnerable to attack and how they should respond if they become the target of a campaign.

The article has, of course, been inspired by the latest Vodafone protests,but it is much broader in it’s focus than that. It does, in particular, look at the tax...

David McNair of Christian Aid has an article on Comment is Free at the Guardian this morning. Talking about the proposed tax agreement with Switzerland he says:

The government might call it pragmatism but its talks with Switzerland, about how to tackle the £100bn or so which Britons have hidden in Swiss bank accounts, suggest that it is suffering from both naivety and a severe case of beggar-thy-neighbour. What the two governments have said is that they will try to do a deal to give the UK some of the tax that its...

My sources tell me that:

The European commission has realised that the DTAs would compromise the EU work on automatic exchange of info. Now the Commission has been in direct touch with Germany and UK regarding this issue. Most important is that they are concerned about Switzerland now being a conduit for all black money back to the UK / Germany if assets are regularised…

So they should be. With the fundamentalist free market government of the UK (yes, I mean that fundamentalist comment – those in our ...