The land that export controls forgot
“I believe we should think again before doing anything.”
It’s globalisation, stupid.
As in almost every war, it turns out that those camel herders somewhere ‘over there’ are engaged in a networked techno-war.
Field trip
Is the physical geography of the internet bent around the shape of the government infrastructure to monitor it illicitly?
Heroes and villains
Meet my nemeses: Doctor Fiscal Ruling. The Incredible Unbalanced Tax Treaty. OffshoreStructureWoman.
Embargo blues
The lesson from Darfur is not that the Security Council can’t enforce arms embargoes, but that it won’t.
Where have all the tax avoiders gone?
A new holding company created in the Cayman Islands expressly to sell assets worth tens of millions of dollars. Those assets assigned an accounting value of zero, effectively invisible in the company’s balance sheet. An “arbitrary” US$10,000 cash injection explicitly designed to activate a tax law permitting a “total tax free gain of about US$60 million”, calibrated not to affect the “commercial effects of the transaction.”What label should we give…
Eight speculations
I know, I know: bloggers should resist the urge to speculate about a company’s tax affairs unless they’ve really spent a good long time scouring company registries, reading court cases, talking to people in and outside the company, corresponding with tax directors. Doing their best to review everything that’s in the public domain, and as much of what isn’t as they can get their hands on.I haven’t, it’s fair to…
Corporate tax 2.0?
The report of the Economic Affairs Committee of the UK House of Lords, released over the summer, is the latest in the deluge of parliamentary inquiries into tax avoidance and the integrity of the corporate profit tax. As you’d expect from a committee that includes both Nigel Lawson and Robert Skidelsky, its report is politically provocative (what report on tax can afford not to be these days?) But it’s also…
How to stop the Antonovs?
Another day, another airstrike. Not Syria. Not Afghanistan. Not north-west Pakistan. This is Sudan, whose daisy-chain of low-intensity wars stretching from Darfur in the west to the Nuba Mountains and finally Blue Nile in the east, so supremely economical with column-inches in the international press, makes more high-profile wars look like youngsters. The Syrian civil war may be more brutal day-to-day, but it looks like an amateur at intractability in…
Wars without news
[UPDATE, 2015: Some months after this post was written in December 2012, the war in CAR did get *quite* a lot of news coverage…] So to last week’s big news: on Tuesday two thousand Chadian troops crossed the border into the Central African Republic (CAR) to help fight a new Centrafrican rebel coalition, Seleka, which for the last month has been seizing towns and territory across northern CAR, just over…