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14 June 2009
WHO Declares TIEA Pandemic
Everybody knows about Double Tax Avoidance Treaties, those big beasts which
roam the international fiscal jungle attempting to reduce the danger that a
company or individual will get taxed twice on the same slice of income, and
usually also reducing withholding taxes between countries, which encourages
trade and foreign direct investment. In brief, they are a Good Thing.
The only problem is, that what you get is often not what it says on the tin,
because the treaties have become infected by Mutual Assistance parasites which
are bred in the cellars of the OECD in Paris. These nasty little animals are
not free-living; but if you go anywhere near a Tax Treaty, they can jump onto
you and infect you. They allow, indeed require, a signatory country to provide
its co-signatory with all possible information that might be to do with an attempt
to minimize (escape, avoid, evade) tax, either unilaterally or on request. One
of the most insidious aspects of these pests is that the their DNA is highly
secretive - no taxpayer, citizen or individual (you and me, in other words)
will ever know that information about them is being passed around between governments.
Not content with unleashing the Mutual Assistance Trojan (MAJ) onto the fiscal
landscape, the OECD's scientists went one further and came up with a free-living
version of the MAJ called the Convention on Mutual Assistance in Tax Matters,
which has infected all the countries of Europe and the OECD on a multilateral
basis. This therefore allows (indeed requires) all those 50 or so countries
to share among themselves all the information they have that might have a bearing
on tax minimization.
The only way for a country to avoid infection by the Convention is to avoid
bodily contact with any of those 50 countries, and this has classically been
the stance of the 'offshore' tax havens, which in the main have resolutely refused
to have anything to do with them, and have thus remained uninfected.
Needless to say, this was anathema to the OECD's experts, who have now come
up with the ne plus ultra of anti-avoidance, an independently viable, free-living,
self-reproducing MAJ called the Tax Information Exchange Agreement. This highly
unpleasant, rodent-like creature can travel around the world until it finds
an uninfected host country, where it immediately takes root and begins breeding.
The TIEA is so designed that once a country has 12 TIEAs in place, this acts
as a critical mass in terms of its relationships with OECD members, and it is
only a matter of time before the host country is completely over-run with TIEAs.
The TIEA has already been very successful, to such an extent that the World
Health Organization raised its TIEA warning level to 6 this week, meaning that
the spread of the disease has reached the level of a pandemic. Governments in
the few remaining uninfected countries, such as Andorra and Vanuatu, are considering
a total ban on inward and outward travel in order to protect themselves, but
it is probably already too late for them to resist.
Welcome to the future! The only consolation is that governments are so incompetent
that they are probably losing all this information about you even more quickly
than they are assembling it. Not the identity thieves, though, who are as efficient
as governments are inefficient, and will undoubtedly steal the information before
it can be lost.
The real answer of course is to be so poor that no-one cares about you. See
you in the pub later on and we'll spend out last euros together.
You have been
reading an entry on the following blog:
It's very confusing to read the newspapers at the moment, with
every economic pundit peddling his or her own nostrum for how to right the wrongs
of the banking sector. And over Davos the air has been positively blue with
a cloud of conflicting agendas for our economic future.
Well, I'm a financial journalist as well. If they can do it, why
can't I? So here goes! You have been warned; now is the time to stop reading.
To begin with a history lesson: Bang!
Big Bang, that is. The process by which partner-based investment
banking firms were absorbed (at mind-blowing cost) into commercial banking firms
who wanted to be 'universal' banks. Mostly this happened in the early 1980s,
and the process largely demolished the centuries-old model in which people with
capital formed private partnerships in which they could make or lose money without
any embarrassing onlookers such as shareholders.
It's fact that investment banking (m&a, ipos, what is now
called private equity, and all the trading that is associated with these activities)
can make silly amounts of money, and occasionally lose it as well. How can there
be any objection to that if it is done in private? There never was any; the
problem has come with the fact that the clever wheeler-dealers who make these
enormous sums of money now do it in the full public view, and that makes them
vulnerable.
The marriage of private and public banking, with a substantial
injection of 'popular capitalism', led to securitization, itself nothing new
(every public company has been 'securitized'), but a dangerous weapon in the
hands of deal-obsessed investment banking magicians. This was the moment at
which, with hindsight, the regulators should have set up a structure to measure
and control the risks being generated by new instruments such as CDOs. But the
regulatory structure is compartmentalized in every country as well as internationally:
retail banking, insurance, futures and so forth.
Understanding the reasons for the collapse that ensued is not
to withhold blame: there was a Faustian pact between the politicians who need
growth to show off to their electorates (and certainly don't understand 'rocket
science'), the inexperienced young bankers who dined out on toxic mortage debt,
and perhaps most culpable of all, the ratings agencies, themselves totally unregulated
and unsupervised, who allowed and encouraged the ball to continue long after
midnight. But it's very difficult to blame the investment bankers; they were
just doing their job.
There's no going back, however. Any sort of forcible separation
between commercial and investment banking a la Glass-Steagall will simply set
back international economic growth by a decade. The ignorance of politicians
about investment banking and the popular anger that results can be cured by
education - you can see this process taking place already as more and more hacks
like myself come to understand that investment bankers are a necessity. 'The
unacceptable face of capitalism' was Edward Heath's comment, and the Germans
simply call them 'locusts'. But we have to accept them, like root canals and
traffic wardens, as a part of our complex society.
As to preventing the next 'crash'? Well, we can't. While human
nature stays as it is, booms and busts are as inevitable as love and infidelity.
What can be done is to fine tune the regulatory systems, try to bring them up
to date and to stop them lagging behind innovation quite so badly in future.
And most of all, say no to any 'solution' put forward by politicians, because
they are the very last people capable of understanding the problem.
The British government is now face to face with the consequences of the mistakes
it has made over the last ten years in regulating and taxing its gaming sector.
It is scarcely the only country to have trodden the same error-strewn path,
but in the case of the UK the damage is greater because of the highly profitable
industry which the government's policies have now almost destroyed.
'For many reasons, increasingly few companies active in the British market
are now regulated by the Commission,' bleats Minister for Sport Gerry Sutcliffe.
So what has happened?
In 2001 the Government replaced its age-old system of taxing punters with a
15% tax on gaming gross profits (and operators also have to pay VAT plus corporation
tax plus a super contribution on any horse-racing turnover to a superannuated,
cosy old industry nag called the Betting Levy Board). This step wouldn't necessarily
have been fatal on its own, but when Internet betting started to supersede the
betting-shop kind, and UK-based operators began to desert in droves to Malta,
Gibraltar, Costa Rica and the Channel Islands, the government imposed a 15%
tax on Internet gaming profits for all those firms which it licensed, and created
a tough licensing regime under the Gaming Commission. But it could only license
firms on its own territory and was forced to allow in all EU-based firms, without
being able to tax them.
Now, with gaming tax revenues disappearing down a black hole, it is having
a King Canute tantrum and wants to impose licensing (and hence taxation) on
all the firms that operate in the UK (ie advertise there for punters). But why
should the EU permit this? There are perfectly adequate regulatory, licensing
and taxation regimes in Ireland, Malta and Gibraltar, all EU Member States,
and where the ex-UK betting firms now prosper. Under what circumstances are
they going to allow the UK to steal their revenues, or to replace their rules
with a new set? And under what law can the UK forbid another properly-licensed
EU operator from advertising freely throughout the EU?
The ECJ's Gambelli ruling in 2003 was unequivocal: gambling is a service and
is subject to EU freedom of establishment rules. There is no way in which one
EU Member State is going to be able to impose its own legislative practices
on another one. The EU Commission has already attacked France on this issue.
It is a mystery how Minister Sutcliffe could be so badly advised as even to
try.
What the government should have done was to accept the inevitable and offer
a light-touch, low-tax regime to compete with Malta et al, instead of hiding
benhind a hypocritical ('protect our children') smokescreen. All it really cares
about is the tax, and now it has lost that along with the gaming industry. The
existing law is a dead letter, as the government is implicity acknowledging:
you can ban a foreign firm from advertising on the Internet, but Berkshire is
not Beijing, and if a 16-year old wants to place bets with a Costa Rica poker
site using his father's Swiss credit card and bank account, who is going to
stop him?
Even now it is not too late for the government to come to its senses, but under
Pastor Gordon Brown's presbyterian theocracy, and faced with the Treasury's
emptying treasure-chest, what chance is there of that? The few remaining British
gaming firms will now pack their bags and leave. 'Mene, mene, tekel upharsin'.
Penelope Wise
Penny Wise but not Pound Foolish! But remember: I am not offering investment advice. My comments are just for your general information; I do not recommend investments, and you should take professional advice before entering any investment contract.
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