Showing posts with label enquiry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label enquiry. Show all posts
Saturday 30 March 2024
Wednesday 3 November 2021
Thursday 9 May 2019
Sunday 26 November 2017
Saturday 24 September 2016
Do we really want post-Brexit Britain to be the world’s biggest tax haven?
Molly Scott Cato in The Guardian
Of all my political activities in the European parliament my work on challenging tax-dodging by wealthy individuals and corporations is perhaps the area where the most has been achieved.
Yet as a British MEP it has been a constant source of embarrassment to learn the central role played by the City of London and the UK’s overseas territories in the network of tax havens that facilitate a tiny minority to live beyond tax law.
Amber Rudd facing calls to clarify involvement in tax havens
This was first demonstrated by the Panama Papers and now confirmed by theBahamas leaks. I am left wondering, in post-EU referendum Britain, whether we will see the UK government challenge or collude with this tax-avoidance industry. If the response to the discovery that home secretary Amber Rudd was previously director of two asset-management companies based in the Bahamas is anything to go by, alarm bells should be ringing.
My own attempts to challenge Rudd have led me to believe that rightwing media figures, along with the Conservative government and the banks, are keener to shut down legitimate lines of inquiry on tax dodging than they are to shut down tax havens.
This was most clearly demonstrated to me during an interview with Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics show. Neil defended Rudd’s actions on the grounds there was no proof she had done anything illegal. Yet the whole purpose of tax havens is to allow the wealthy to hide behind a wall of secrecy legally.
Indeed, we only know of Rudd’s past career because of the Bahamas leaks. When asked in interview some months ago if she had money in any offshore trusts, Rudd replied that she didn’t. She also defended David Cameron over his father’s investment fund in the Bahamas that was exposed by the Panama Papers. At least Cameron had the defence that the decision to set up a trust in the Bahamas was taken by his father. It was Rudd’s own decision to become embroiled in two offshore companies in the Bahamas, something she failed to disclose.
Generally, people do not set up companies in the Bahamas to enjoy the subtropical climate. They are more likely drawn there by the fact the islands demand no income, corporate or wealth taxes from individuals investing in offshore companies. No evidence has emerged that Rudd herself or the companies avoided paying tax but at the very least, a fuller statement explaining the purpose of the directorships and whether she personally profited from them seems reasonable.
Unless Rudd makes such a statement it is difficult to see how Theresa May can continue to have confidence in her as home secretary. During her short leadership campaign and on the steps of No 10, May spoke noble words about the need to turn Britain into a country that works for the many, not the few. This is precisely the opposite of what tax havens do. They are a system used by a tiny elite composed of the super-wealthy precisely to avoid contributing their fair share to society.
So is Rudd on the side of the many, whose services have been cut to the bone because of insufficient tax revenues, or is she on the side of the wealthy few who avoid paying taxes?
Follow the money: inside the world's tax havens
Far from being a sideshow, what some are calling Ruddgate goes to the heart of the question of what type of society we want in the wake of the EU referendum. Will we follow the lead taken by Europe in promoting fair taxation, most notably demonstrated in recent weeks by EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who ordered Apple to pay €13bn in back taxes? Or will we follow the route being pushed by some hard-Brexit supporters and become one of the globe’s leading tax havens? The answer depends on the actions we take now, and whether we have the courage to demand the highest standards of those who govern our country.
The European parliament’s committee investigating the Panama Papers leaks already has the chancellor Philip Hammond, his predecessor Osborne and former prime minister David Cameron on our invitation list. Following the latest revelations, we will be adding the name of the home secretary.
Of all my political activities in the European parliament my work on challenging tax-dodging by wealthy individuals and corporations is perhaps the area where the most has been achieved.
Yet as a British MEP it has been a constant source of embarrassment to learn the central role played by the City of London and the UK’s overseas territories in the network of tax havens that facilitate a tiny minority to live beyond tax law.
Amber Rudd facing calls to clarify involvement in tax havens
This was first demonstrated by the Panama Papers and now confirmed by theBahamas leaks. I am left wondering, in post-EU referendum Britain, whether we will see the UK government challenge or collude with this tax-avoidance industry. If the response to the discovery that home secretary Amber Rudd was previously director of two asset-management companies based in the Bahamas is anything to go by, alarm bells should be ringing.
My own attempts to challenge Rudd have led me to believe that rightwing media figures, along with the Conservative government and the banks, are keener to shut down legitimate lines of inquiry on tax dodging than they are to shut down tax havens.
This was most clearly demonstrated to me during an interview with Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics show. Neil defended Rudd’s actions on the grounds there was no proof she had done anything illegal. Yet the whole purpose of tax havens is to allow the wealthy to hide behind a wall of secrecy legally.
Indeed, we only know of Rudd’s past career because of the Bahamas leaks. When asked in interview some months ago if she had money in any offshore trusts, Rudd replied that she didn’t. She also defended David Cameron over his father’s investment fund in the Bahamas that was exposed by the Panama Papers. At least Cameron had the defence that the decision to set up a trust in the Bahamas was taken by his father. It was Rudd’s own decision to become embroiled in two offshore companies in the Bahamas, something she failed to disclose.
Generally, people do not set up companies in the Bahamas to enjoy the subtropical climate. They are more likely drawn there by the fact the islands demand no income, corporate or wealth taxes from individuals investing in offshore companies. No evidence has emerged that Rudd herself or the companies avoided paying tax but at the very least, a fuller statement explaining the purpose of the directorships and whether she personally profited from them seems reasonable.
Unless Rudd makes such a statement it is difficult to see how Theresa May can continue to have confidence in her as home secretary. During her short leadership campaign and on the steps of No 10, May spoke noble words about the need to turn Britain into a country that works for the many, not the few. This is precisely the opposite of what tax havens do. They are a system used by a tiny elite composed of the super-wealthy precisely to avoid contributing their fair share to society.
So is Rudd on the side of the many, whose services have been cut to the bone because of insufficient tax revenues, or is she on the side of the wealthy few who avoid paying taxes?
Follow the money: inside the world's tax havens
Far from being a sideshow, what some are calling Ruddgate goes to the heart of the question of what type of society we want in the wake of the EU referendum. Will we follow the lead taken by Europe in promoting fair taxation, most notably demonstrated in recent weeks by EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who ordered Apple to pay €13bn in back taxes? Or will we follow the route being pushed by some hard-Brexit supporters and become one of the globe’s leading tax havens? The answer depends on the actions we take now, and whether we have the courage to demand the highest standards of those who govern our country.
The European parliament’s committee investigating the Panama Papers leaks already has the chancellor Philip Hammond, his predecessor Osborne and former prime minister David Cameron on our invitation list. Following the latest revelations, we will be adding the name of the home secretary.
Friday 22 July 2011
How many inquiries do we need?
8:50PM BST 21 Jul 2011
After the past three extraordinary weeks, do you know how many inquiries have now been spawned by the hacking scandal? The answer – unless I have missed some – is 13. As well as the Leveson inquiry, in two separate parts, there are: two criminal inquiries, Elveden and Weeting; two parliamentary inquiries, one now concluded, by the home affairs and media select committees; inquiries by the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the Inspectorate of Constabulary; a probe by the former parliamentary watchdog Elizabeth Filkin into relationships between the police and the media; an inquiry by the Met’s directorate of professional standards; a News International internal inquiry; a Press Complaints Commission review; and, finally, my own personal favourite: an inquiry into how the Commons security authorities can best interdict future supplies of shaving foam. All British scandals tumble eventually into farce. What a tribute to the information age that this one is toying with it already.
On top of all this, there is talk of further action by the Metropolitan Police Authority, the London Assembly, the Serious Fraud Office and HM Revenue and Customs. And that is without the inquiries likely to begin in America. Soon, I predict, there will be more people investigating the News of the World than actually worked for it, and the only official bodies not scrutinising the despicable crimes of the rogue Murdoch regime will be the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Care Council for Wales.
Yet as the scandal begins to cede the top slot on the news, I sense that more and more people are asking: has
this gone too far? Four days ago, as John Yates, the Met’s assistant commissioner, was forced to resign, even the crime correspondent of the Guardian, the paper whose admirable journalism and persistence opened the Augean stable doors, called the affair a “mad witch-hunt of a story” which had claimed “another decent copper”.
this gone too far? Four days ago, as John Yates, the Met’s assistant commissioner, was forced to resign, even the crime correspondent of the Guardian, the paper whose admirable journalism and persistence opened the Augean stable doors, called the affair a “mad witch-hunt of a story” which had claimed “another decent copper”.
The danger of this extraordinary brood of inquiries is twofold. First, they crash against each other like dodgems in a rink. Witnesses are already refusing to answer questions because it might prejudice their case before other inquiries. Second, they will leave nobody in power or in the police with time to do their actual jobs – jobs that concern more important matters than phone hacking. John Yates ran Britain’s counter-terrorism effort, which has now been decapitated. Let us cross our fingers that no terror attack occurs while his successor is still learning the ropes.
Mr Yates, by his own admission, didn’t look carefully enough at the Guardian’s new allegations of hacking. But he did have the country to protect from al-Qaeda at the time. And as I watched him being attacked by that well-known pillar of virtue, Keith Vaz MP, as an “unconvincing” witness to Mr Vaz’s home affairs committee, I thought: I would rather have 50 John Yateses than one Keith Vaz.
Older readers may remember that while John Yates has been found guilty of nothing, Mr Vaz is the man who received one of the longest Commons suspensions on record – for actively obstructing, not just neglecting, an official investigation. On the day that Sir Paul Stephenson, Yates’s boss, resigned as Met commissioner after taking free stays at the Champneys health spa from a friend, Stephen Purdew, Mr Vaz appeared on television to praise Sir Paul for “accepting responsibility”. Mr Vaz neglected to mention that he, too, is a personal friend of Mr Purdew’s, attended his wedding, endorsed one of his other spas and has himself stayed at Champneys.
Throughout the crisis, too, a certain Alastair Campbell has been touring the television studios in his exciting new role as an apostle of truth and enemy of Rupert Murdoch. Mr Campbell has provided much amusement for politicians and journalists – but has the poor man not even an atom of self-awareness?
Last week, almost entirely unnoticed amid the Dresden-like firestorm, there emerged perhaps the most significant evidence yet about an earlier phase of Mr Campbell’s career. The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war published the testimony of a senior MI6 officer that “there were from the outset concerns” in the intelligence service about “the extent to which the intelligence could support some of the judgments that were being made” in Tony Blair’s famous WMD dossier. Note those words: from the outset.
What that shows us is not just that our worst fears over the dossier were correct. It also shows just how misplaced may be our hopes in the current slew of hacking inquiries. Over Iraq, there were a mere five inquiries – none, interestingly, operating under oath, though the hacking inquiry will. Clearly, the lies and misjudgments that caused the deaths of 150,000 people are not quite as serious a matter as journalists intercepting voicemails.
But the striking fact is that despite all those inquiries, last week’s potentially conclusive piece of evidence has only just come out – nine years after the dossier was published. We hoped that earlier inquiries would yield the truth about Iraq and punish those responsible. Broadly, they did not. They did reveal a great deal of valuable information but in their own findings, the inquiries glossed over that evidence, and held back from the conclusions it warranted.
Nor is that in any way unusual. Of course, some much-anticipated judicial inquiries do achieve what is widely accepted as justice. But many others have been, by consensus unsatisfactory – Lord Devlin’s 1950s inquiry into British massacres of the Mau Mau; Lord Denning on Profumo; Widgery into Bloody Sunday; Scott on arms-to-Iraq; and Hutton.
Still others, while less controversial at the time, have proved damaging: the last big inquiry into the police, Lord Macpherson’s into the death of Stephen Lawrence, wielded too broad a brush, painting the entire Met as institutionally racist. The destabilising effect of Macpherson’s judgment on force morale, and therefore on crime, was considerable. And inquiries can cost enormous amounts of money. The second inquiry into Bloody Sunday, by Lord Saville, lasted 12½ years and cost almost £200 million.
Inquiries do, of course, go down paths that can be deeply uncomfortable for everyone, government included. But broadly, each of these inquiries found more or less what the governments who set them up wanted them to find – that no one was wrongly killed on Bloody Sunday, that the Iraq intelligence had not been misrepresented, that the Met was insufficiently progressive and needed a kicking.
The various Iraq inquiries were additionally used by the Blair government, and its supporters, as ways of attacking its enemies. As a witness in them myself, and watching the grilling of my source, David Kelly, I developed a particularly low opinion of the partisan hectoring of the foreign affairs committee, under its Labour loyalist chairman Donald Anderson (a worthy predecessor of Keith Vaz).
It is quite clear what the Government wants this inquiry to find. Though press, police and politicians are almost equally at fault, Lord Leveson’s remit is simply to “inquire into the culture, practices, and ethics of the press”. Leveson has also been asked to investigate the “relationships between national newspapers and politicians”. But several anti-hacking campaigners and the lawyer for Milly Dowler’s family protest that there is no mention of officials and special advisers such as Andy Coulson and Alastair Campbell.
Leveson’s first task is to “make recommendations for a new, more effective policy and regulatory regime” on the press: in other words, how they should be forced to behave. As far as the police and politicians are concerned, however, he will only make recommendations for their “future conduct” – how they should merely be asked to behave.
Yet hacking was not a failure of press regulation. There already is a rather strong regulation against hacking people’s telephones – the law. And no future press regulator, however strong, could possibly have the power to kick down doors at newspapers, seize emails and question journalists under caution. Those are police powers – powers which the police had, but refused to exercise.
Over virtually every issue that judges have inquired into, it was the media that got more of the facts, more quickly, than any Lord Justice. Now, however, with regulation coming and the likes of Keith Vaz in the driving seat, getting the facts will be harder. Not for nothing is the phrase “judge-led inquiry” one of the scariest in the language.
Throughout the crisis, too, a certain Alastair Campbell has been touring the television studios in his exciting new role as an apostle of truth and enemy of Rupert Murdoch. Mr Campbell has provided much amusement for politicians and journalists – but has the poor man not even an atom of self-awareness?
Last week, almost entirely unnoticed amid the Dresden-like firestorm, there emerged perhaps the most significant evidence yet about an earlier phase of Mr Campbell’s career. The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war published the testimony of a senior MI6 officer that “there were from the outset concerns” in the intelligence service about “the extent to which the intelligence could support some of the judgments that were being made” in Tony Blair’s famous WMD dossier. Note those words: from the outset.
What that shows us is not just that our worst fears over the dossier were correct. It also shows just how misplaced may be our hopes in the current slew of hacking inquiries. Over Iraq, there were a mere five inquiries – none, interestingly, operating under oath, though the hacking inquiry will. Clearly, the lies and misjudgments that caused the deaths of 150,000 people are not quite as serious a matter as journalists intercepting voicemails.
But the striking fact is that despite all those inquiries, last week’s potentially conclusive piece of evidence has only just come out – nine years after the dossier was published. We hoped that earlier inquiries would yield the truth about Iraq and punish those responsible. Broadly, they did not. They did reveal a great deal of valuable information but in their own findings, the inquiries glossed over that evidence, and held back from the conclusions it warranted.
Nor is that in any way unusual. Of course, some much-anticipated judicial inquiries do achieve what is widely accepted as justice. But many others have been, by consensus unsatisfactory – Lord Devlin’s 1950s inquiry into British massacres of the Mau Mau; Lord Denning on Profumo; Widgery into Bloody Sunday; Scott on arms-to-Iraq; and Hutton.
Still others, while less controversial at the time, have proved damaging: the last big inquiry into the police, Lord Macpherson’s into the death of Stephen Lawrence, wielded too broad a brush, painting the entire Met as institutionally racist. The destabilising effect of Macpherson’s judgment on force morale, and therefore on crime, was considerable. And inquiries can cost enormous amounts of money. The second inquiry into Bloody Sunday, by Lord Saville, lasted 12½ years and cost almost £200 million.
Inquiries do, of course, go down paths that can be deeply uncomfortable for everyone, government included. But broadly, each of these inquiries found more or less what the governments who set them up wanted them to find – that no one was wrongly killed on Bloody Sunday, that the Iraq intelligence had not been misrepresented, that the Met was insufficiently progressive and needed a kicking.
The various Iraq inquiries were additionally used by the Blair government, and its supporters, as ways of attacking its enemies. As a witness in them myself, and watching the grilling of my source, David Kelly, I developed a particularly low opinion of the partisan hectoring of the foreign affairs committee, under its Labour loyalist chairman Donald Anderson (a worthy predecessor of Keith Vaz).
It is quite clear what the Government wants this inquiry to find. Though press, police and politicians are almost equally at fault, Lord Leveson’s remit is simply to “inquire into the culture, practices, and ethics of the press”. Leveson has also been asked to investigate the “relationships between national newspapers and politicians”. But several anti-hacking campaigners and the lawyer for Milly Dowler’s family protest that there is no mention of officials and special advisers such as Andy Coulson and Alastair Campbell.
Leveson’s first task is to “make recommendations for a new, more effective policy and regulatory regime” on the press: in other words, how they should be forced to behave. As far as the police and politicians are concerned, however, he will only make recommendations for their “future conduct” – how they should merely be asked to behave.
Yet hacking was not a failure of press regulation. There already is a rather strong regulation against hacking people’s telephones – the law. And no future press regulator, however strong, could possibly have the power to kick down doors at newspapers, seize emails and question journalists under caution. Those are police powers – powers which the police had, but refused to exercise.
Over virtually every issue that judges have inquired into, it was the media that got more of the facts, more quickly, than any Lord Justice. Now, however, with regulation coming and the likes of Keith Vaz in the driving seat, getting the facts will be harder. Not for nothing is the phrase “judge-led inquiry” one of the scariest in the language.
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