TREASURE ISLANDS

Where’s the organised civil society pushback on big finance and monopolies?

Tax is a complex and bewildering subject: and international tax is an order of magnitude more complex. Throw in tax havens, and it’s a blizzard of confusion.

But it’s a testament to the success of groups like the Tax Justice Network (TJN), an organisation that I’ve worked with (part-time) for some years now, that despite all the complexity tax has…

The one and only Chris Simpson

This is generally supposed to be a blog about tax havens, and this post isn’t anything to do with tax havens. But this is my blog and I can post what I want: if you read it you’ll see why. Chris died of a heart attack in Dakar just over a month ago.

Who was Chris Simpson?

For…

Treasure Islands, relaunched for Truxit

There is now a new version of Treasure Islands available. Essentially, it’s got a new introduction, and a new chapter.  Here is an excerpt.

“The Brexit vote was, in the end, about globalisation. The hottest issue was immigration, which is, as Professor John van Reenen of the London School of Economics points out, ‘globalisation made flesh’. But behind the

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If you’re in Dublin on 23 September 2016 . . .

‘Tax justice, not tax havens’: 10am-1pm, Friday September 23, 12-14 Lower Mount Street, Dublin 2.

This event will bring together tax justice activists, academics, aid organisations and trade unionists from across Ireland to discuss tax justice in Ireland and internationally.

The Tax Justice Network’s Nicholas Shaxson, author of ‘Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world’, and…

Top tax expert calls for Big 4 accounting firms to be broken up. Me too

Adapted from the Tax Justice Network blog:

In March The Economist magazine rang alarm bells (again) about a rise in concentrated market power: a problem where the biggest firms get ever bigger and more like monopolies, making it easy to extract wealth from the rest of us (as opposed to creating wealth.) This, in turn fosters steeper inequality and poverty and reduces economic growth. As…

My Vanity Fair article on Donald Trump

It’s called The Great Trump Tax Mysteries: Is He Hiding Loopholes, Errors, or Something More Serious?

It’s been fascinating. I had two interviews with him: each time, he politely ended the interview when I asked him what, precisely, he would do to tackle tax havens.

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Pre-Brexit has already handed the City of London four big victories

That’s the conclusion of a new report by the non-governmental body Corporate Observatory Europe, entitled How Cameron’s
referendum delivered victories to Big Finance. The introduction summarises:

“From the day a ballot on UK membership was first announced by David Cameron three years ago, the financial sector has sought and won significant lobbying victories thanks to a complicit

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The Panama papers are not about tax

This contains a cross-post from a blog I wrote for the Tax Justice Network recently, with the same headline. It complements another article I wrote for the UK’s Prospect Magazine, entitled Don’t Call Them Tax Havens. An introductory paragraph says:

“A few have called this the “Panama tax avoidance scandal,” but this reveals a profound misunderstanding of tax

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Five myths about tax havens

Cross-posted from the Tax Justice Network, on my article in the Washington Post entitled Five Myths about Tax havens.

The myths go like this:

• Tax havens protect vulnerable people against despotic governments, unjust laws and political turmoil.

• Tax havens are good for high-tax nations.

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Global Tax Fairness: new book

Cross-posted from the Tax Justice Network: highlighting a new book, containing a chapter of mine entitled Tax Competitiveness: a Dangerous Obsession.

This new book from Oxford University Press, edited by Thomas Pogge and Krishen Mehta, publishes fifteen chapters by leading tax justice scholars on different topics ranging from country-by-country reporting to unitary taxation, from automatic information…