The Boiling Frog: Taxing

Tuesday, 15 May 2012

Taxing

This from the prominent left wing blog Political Scrapbook:

(PS emphasis)

Vodafone’s top lawyer in India has quit after being tangled up in a four-year long tax evasion scandal. The row has seen the Indian government bullied by its biggest foreign corporate investor — but officials are not giving up on extracting $2.6bn from the company.

One suspects that Political Scrapbook needs to learn the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion, or perhaps the loose interchange of the terms in the same article is deliberate...?

3 comments:

Sobers15 May 2012 at 22:12
This sort of article p!sses me off royally. Apart from the usual deliberate evasion/avoidance confusion, its the very facts that are mangled too. It's not tax avoidance when you take your case to court and win!!! The Supreme Court of India agreed with Vodafone, and found in its favour. How is obeying the law somehow morally reprehensible nowadays?

I suppose the people who write this guff would accept anything that HMRC send to them? Nice big tax demand? Pay straight up, no questions asked of course! After all when has the tax man ever made a mistake?
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TheBoilingFrog16 May 2012 at 08:39
@Sobers It was a complete mangle I agree. I had to go and look up the case elsewhere to try to work out what was going on.

But such things are just mere detail to PS - big corporations? Boo. People paying lots and lots of tax? Hurray
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James Higham17 May 2012 at 18:50
Couldn't have happened to a nicer country. What are they going to do when they lose the BT contract?
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(Former Lib Dem leader, Charles Kennedy, 2002)

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(Then German Finance Minister, Hans Eichel, 2002)

"There are no real benefits and some real costs to the UK of monetary independence... it makes sense from a financial stability perspective for the UK to contract out monetary policy to the ECB".
(Citigroup Chief Economist, Willem Buiter, 2007)

"Taking part in EMU would improve policy and performance enough to eliminate many of the strains that sceptics predict would emerge without the safety valve of devaluation".
(BBC Trust Vice Chairman, Diane Coyle OBE, 1997)

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"The strict rules attached to the euro could emerge as one of the best ways to persuade the markets that we will put Humpty Dumpty back together again, put the public finances in order".
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The British Government Knew The Consequences In 1971

Foreign and Commonwealth Office 30/1048 - 1971

...the transfer of major executive responsibilities to the bureaucratic Commission in Brussels will exacerbate popular feeling of alienation from government. To counter this feeling, strengthened local and regional democratic processes within the member states and effective Community regional economic and social policies will be essential.

Parliamentary sovereignty will be affected as we have seen. But the need for Parliament to play an increasing (if perhaps more specialised) role may develop. Firstly, although a European Parliament might in the longest term become an effective, directly elected democratic check upon the bureaucracy, this will not be for a long time, and certainly not in the decade to come. In the interval, to minimise the loss of democratic control it will be important that the British Parliamentarians should play an effective role both through the British membership in the European Parliament and through the processes of the British Parliament itself.

Test

Tuesday, 15 May 2012

Taxing

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