October 21st, 2010
BERLIN—On Friday and Saturday this week (October 22d-23th), the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank governors are due to meet in South Korea. The G20 had raised big expectations at a time when it
promised the end of bank secrecy (London, April 2009). At that time, capital markets were reaching their lowest point over several years. Since then, they have partially recovered and the G20 tone has considerably softened. Would we have a correlation between Dow Jones levels and G20 softness? Without going that far, we can only reaffirm that transparency and the fight against corruption still have...
September 3rd, 2010
On Monday, amid much fanfare, Switzerland signed a
revised double tax treaty with India, concerning exchange of information between the two jurisdictions (for general background on what tax treaties and TIEAs are, see
here.) Recently,
we blogged Indian concerns about the OECD's standard of information exchange, and we have
written extensively on the OECD standards themselves, calling them woefully inadequate and noting that they are emphtically not, as the OECD likes to assert, the "internationally accepted standard."
It may be a sign of the pressures that developing countries are under that...
August 30th, 2010
The Swiss government has
announced that it has examined the dossiers of over four thousand UBS clients suspected of committing tax evasion offences in the United States, but they have only transmitted their findings to the US authorities for around half of the examined cases.
Under the terms of the administrative agreement agreed between Switzerland and the US in August 2009, criteria were established for proceeding with an administrative assistance request submitted by the Inland Revenue Service. This included a requirement that the Swiss Federal Tax Authority examines 4,450 UBS...
