Financial Transparency Coalition

The tax deal between the UK and Switzerland initialed today is reported to:

retrospectively tax existing banking relationships in Switzerland, persons resident in the UK should be given one chance to make an anonymous lump-sum tax payment. The size of this tax burden will vary from between 19% to 34% of the assets in question, and will be determined based on the duration of the client relationship as well as the initial and final amount of the capital. Instead of such a payment, those affected should also have the possibility of disclosing their banking relationship in Switzerland to the British authorities.

To...

I have the following article in the latest edition of the London Review of Books:

In his budget last month George Osborne announced that if in the future a UK company runs its internal banking arrangements through a tax haven subsidiary it will benefit from a special tax rate of just 5.75 per cent of the resulting profits. The rate is exceptionally low: the same activity undertaken in the UK is taxed at 23 per cent. It is a change that will delight corporate tax avoiders everywhere: the UK will now condone the use of tax havens in locations such as...

I’ve read the government’s new anti-avoidance strategy for tax. It’s not a good read. For that reason I think a  translation is needed. First of all, as I’ve already noted, the  government has a massive problem in agreeing how big this issue is. That does not help them politically, and undermines much of the forward. Whatever the issue then is, the strategy is laid out in four parts, each being allocated a chapter in their paper. Chapter one says there is a strategy. It’s a little hard to work out what it is due to use of a weird graphic, but...