TREASURE ISLANDS

The Finance curse – my new book

This morning I have published a short new book entitled The Finance Curse: how oversized financial centres attack democracy and corrupt economies. Co-authored with John Christensen, the former economic adviser to the UK tax haven of Jersey and director of the Tax Justice Network (TJN), The Finance Curse combines elements of my two previous books, Treasure Islands and Poisoned…

UK Prime Minister writes to British tax havens. How serious is he?

Headline summary from us: this contains much that is positive. But the devil…

Luxembourg versus Ireland: tax havens competing to be more rotten than each other

The FT has a story this morning entitled Investors attack ‘lax’ Luxembourg fund rules. But Luxembourg is a scuzzy little tax haven: what else where these investors expecting?

A bit over year ago I wrote a short blog pointing to a letter from recovery specialists Deminor to Luxembourg’s Finance Minister, on behalf of 2,500 disgruntled investors around…

Austerity and growth: how is it going?

This graph is interesting.

Read all about it from Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books, here.

Britain’s non-existent crackdown on multinational tax abuse

Britain’s governing coalition has made great song and dance about how it plans a crackdown on abusive tax avoidance by large multinational corporations. I gave a talk at the festival in the southern English town of Brighton yesterday, where I examined these claims and described them as “a disaster” and “a con.”

I am not alone. The latest…

In the British tax haven of Jersey, don’t speak out against tax havenry

Something I just wrote on the Tax Justice blog:

TJN has written on several occasions about the rather authoritarian nature of the political system in the British tax haven of Jersey. There is no functioning system of party politics there; there is only one newspaper which equates the interests of the offshore centre with the interests of…

The capture of tax haven Ireland: “the bankers, hedge funds got virtually everything they wanted”

The Financial Times is carrying an important and fascinating story about the tax haven of Ireland. It focuses on a particular issue which is dear to my heart, and the subject of a whole chapter of Treasure Islands.

This is, at heart, a story about how small financial centres become entirely ‘captured’ by financial services interests, with the deliberate…

Heard that countries should ‘compete’ on tax? Wrong

Updated: the longer article is now available, here.

An article on tax competition in The Guardian, co-authored by Ellie Mae O’Hagan and me.

It’s subtitled “Tax ‘competition’ – in which countries fight to lower taxes – not only hits the poor, it doesn’t even help the economy grow.”

Which is exactly right. Our article starts like this:…

A way to help pay for Cyprus’ bailout?

From the excellent series of reports on Cyprus’ richest man, John Fredriksen, in Norway’s Dagens Næringsliv (DN.NO – see my earlier blog on this, which I think explains a lot of things about Cyprus that has eluded the large majority of the world’s media).

Norwegian-born Fredriksen is a shipping tycoon whom Forbes described as “King…

This, from Tanzania, is pleasing

A tweet from Zitto Zuberi Kabwe, Tanzanian opposition member and shadow finance minister:

The tweet kind of speaks for itself.

Tanzania does have a capital gains tax, and certainly does “deserve” it, though the government has been in court to try and levy it on the Mantra transaction, which concerns a uranium mine. As Bloomberg noted…