Multinational CEOs tell David Cameron to rein in tax avoidance rhetoric | Business. The bosses of some of Britain's largest multinational corporations have urged David Cameron to stop moralising and rein in his rhetoric on tax avoidance ahead of a G8 summit next month. Chief executives of companies such as Burberry, Tesco, Vodafone, BAE Systems, Prudential and GSK were keen to take a final opportunity to lobby the prime minister in advance of the meeting of political leaders in Northern Ireland. Cameron has pledged to use Britain's G8 presidency to tackle aggressive tax avoidance by multinationals, but is also keen to heed the counsel of his business advisory group, which he met with on Monday. Also present was Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt, despite the internet search firm coming under fierce attack from MPs last week because of its tax arrangements.
The president of the Confederation of British Industry, Sir Roger Carr, who was at the meeting, was among those who have taken issue with Cameron's attacks on the ethics of big business tax engineering. Tax avoidance: how to change corporate behaviour | Business. Last week, I was waiting in the queue at the butcher while an elderly lady was being served. Clearly, she was not that well-off and chose the cheapest cuts of meat. When she was done, the butcher asked the assistant serving her how much the bill came to. Told that it was £11, he whispered: "Make it £8. " It was a small example of generosity made all the better by the butcher taking care that his customer was unaware of what he was doing.
It was also a far cry from the world of big business in a week that saw dawn raids on Shell and BP for alleged price-fixing and Google accused by the Labour MP Margaret Hodge of doing evil. Stung by the attack from the chairwoman of the Commons public accounts committee, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, mounted a defence in the Observer. Tax is a mightily complex matter for multinational companies, he said. All credit to Hodge for flushing Schmidt out. Nor should we expect otherwise. But perfect competition does not exist. UK Uncut loses legal challenge over Goldman Sachs tax deal with HMRC | UK news. The former head of Revenue and Customs (HMRC) took into account potential embarrassment to George Osborne when letting off Goldman Sachs from paying up to £20m in interest payments, a judge has concluded. In a high court ruling, the judge found that the 2010 "sweetheart" deal brokered by the then permanent secretary for tax, Dave Hartnett, was lawful but "not a glorious episode in the history of the Revenue".
He criticised the fact that it had been done behind closed doors and without proper approval or reference to lawyers. The ruling, following a legal challenge by the pressure group UK Uncut, will come as some relief to HMRC, whose deals with large businesses have come under increasing scrutiny through the courts and before parliament. However, the judge's criticisms will lead to further calls for closer scrutiny of deals which at present are kept hidden from all other authorities, such as select committees, because tax officials insist there must be "taxpayer confidentiality". Fresh questions for Amazon over pittance it pays in tax | Technology.
MPs are ready to haul Amazon back to parliament to answer new questions about its tax status in Britain after a Guardian investigation's findings suggest the online retailer is pushing the tax rulebook to its limits to minimise its tax bill. Company filings showed Amazon's main UK company paid just £3.2m in corporation tax on sales of £320m last year. However, the Seattle-based group has told investors its 2012 UK sales were £4.2bn. The Guardian investigation has found Amazon pushing definitions close to breaking point; and tax authorities unable, or unwilling, to prevent the imposition of aggressive tax avoidance structures.
Information collected by the Guardian details extensive UK activities that suggest HM Revenue and Customs could take a much tougher line on taxing Amazon's multibillion-pound British operations. Among the key indicators of whether a business is taxable in the UK is the location of those negotiating deals. Amazon paid £3m tax on £4bn UK sales | Business. Amazon's main UK subsidiary paid just £3.2m in tax last year, according to accounts filed on Wednesday, despite overall UK sales of £4.2bn. Amazon's taxes for last year are only marginally higher than the £2.5m the company received in government grants during the year, according to the annual accounts published at Companies House. The revelation comes amid public unrest over the minimal contribution of Amazon and fellow digital giants Apple and Google to the British public purse, despite the important contribution UK sales make to their international revenues.
The online retailer's tax charge brings to £6m the total corporation tax raised from Amazon.co.uk Limited in a decade. The company's tax bill was £1.9m in 2011, but these sums may not actually be paid to HM Revenue and Customs because of cumulative losses across the Amazon group. The UK company declared a turnover of £320m for 2012, up 50% on 2011. 100 of UK's richest people concealing billions in offshore tax havens | Politics.
More than 100 of Britain's richest people have been caught hiding billions of pounds in secretive offshore havens, sparking an unprecedented global tax evasion investigation. George Osborne, the chancellor, warned the alleged tax evaders, and a further 200 accountants and advisers accused of helping them cheat the taxman: "The message is simple: if you evade tax, we're coming after you. " HM Revenue & Customs warned those involved, who were named in offshore data first offered to the authorities by a whistleblower in 2009, that they will face "criminal prosecution or significant penalties" if they do not voluntarily disclose their tax irregularities, as the UK steps up its efforts to clamp down on avoidance ahead of the G8 summit in June. The 400-gigabyte cache of data leaked to the authorities is understood to be the same information seen by the Guardian in its Offshore Secrets series in November 2012 and March this year.
Why the politics of envy are keenest among the very rich | George Monbiot. 'I never did anything for money. I never set money as a goal. It was a result. " So says Bob Diamond, formerly the chief executive of Barclays. In doing so Diamond lays waste to the justification that his bank and others (and their innumerable apologists in government and the media) have advanced for surreal levels of remuneration – to incentivise hard work and talent. Others of his class – Bernie Ecclestone and Jeroen van der Veer (the former chief executive of Shell), for example – say the same. The desire for advancement along this scale appears to be insatiable.
The result is "a quarter-century of intermittent lobbying, cajoling and threatening when it comes to his net worth listing". Never mind that he has his own 747, in which he sits on a throne during flights. This pursuit can suck the life out of its adherents. But as the sale of the skyscraper that bears his name and symbolises his pre-eminence begins to look inevitable, he sinks into an impenetrable depression.
Thatcher funeral: Demonstrators pretending to be mourners plan to disrupt funeral by blowing horns and turning their back as the cortege passes. Rows broke out between supporters and demonstrators in the crowds Two dozen people turned their back as coffin went past Effigy strung up in a noose in town of Goldthorpe, South YorkshireFake funeral held in south Yorkshire former mining town Three men arrested on suspicion of anti-Thatcher graffiti this morning Funeral was not shown on big screen in Liverpool and Edinburgh4,000 officers to guard against demonstrations which failed to happenReports of missiles being thrown at coffin were in fact flowersPolice arrest 40-year-old man in Trafalgar Square five hours after funeral Arrested for public order offence after alleged to have been verbally abusive By Jill Reilly Published: 08:09 GMT, 17 April 2013 | Updated: 14:44 GMT, 23 April 2013 Despite heated threats from anti-Thatcher protestors, the demonstrators at the Iron Lady's funeral were drowned out by her supporters today.
Scroll down for video She said: 'Thatcher’s policies were all about individualistic materialism. If the IMF is criticising UK austerity, things must be bad | Michael Burke. The failure of the government's economic policy has led to a damning indictment from the International Monetary Fund. In the fund's flagship World Economic Outlook report it lowered the forecast growth for the advanced economies as a whole, but Britain by more than the rest. The IMF repeatedly singled out the British economy for weak growth and negative outlook. Its chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, said the UK chancellor, George Osborne, was "playing with fire". If the IMF has become a severe critic of Britain's version of austerity, then things must be bad. Within the "troika", including the EU and the European Central Bank, the IMF has been a key architect of those policies in the bailout countries. Visitors to the soup kitchens of Greece, the poor of Cyprus who cannot access their savings and the Irish forced to leave their country must wonder what they have done to incur its wrath.
But severe criticism is emerging of one of the key tracts purporting to justify austerity policies. European Welfare States: World ranking in Unemployment Benefit replacement rates. In times of crisis, the ability of workers who lose their jobs to retain their purchasing power has important social and economic implications. A high replacement rate (ratio of unemployment benefits a worker receives relative to the worker’s last gross earning) ensures that the negative effects of rising unemployment on aggregate demand are mitigated.
It also prevents workers from falling into poverty when they lose their jobs. The table below shows the gross replacement rate in the first year of unemployment for as many countries as is available. The data is taken from a recent IMF working paper (see end of post for full reference). I have ranked countries from highest to lowest (restricting the sample to those countries which replacement rate is superior to 0). An interesting finding is that European countries did not have the monopoly of high replacement rates in 2000. UK unemployment rise adds to pressure on Osborne's austerity strategy | Business. Unemployment jumped by 70,000 in the three months to the end of February, amid the lowest growth in pay rises since 2001, as pressure mounts on George Osborne to adopt a more aggressive growth strategy.
The number of unemployed people reached 2.56 million, with 20,000 under 25-year-olds joining the jobless ranks, pushing the unemployment rate up from 7.8% to 7.9%. It was the third consecutive increase and the highest level since July. Britain's working population is also suffering from an austerity squeeze, with the average pay rise slipping to 1%, the lowest since records began in 2001 and well short of the 2.8% inflation rate. The figures, which reflect a reversal of last year's trend of falling unemployment, come after the International Monetary Fund this week urged the chancellor to ease his austerity plans and deploy more aggressive measures to spur growth. The MPC has remained split for several months despite the governor, Sir Mervyn King, regularly voting for a £25bn boost to QE. David Cameron urged to act over British Virgin Islands | UK news. The prime minister has come under pressure to act against Britain's secretive offshore industry at June's G8 summit, as leaked evidence continued to mount that politicians and tycoons from all over the world have used the British Virgin Islands to hide funds.
The premier of Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, was the latest to be named, along with prominent Pakistani, Indian, Thai and Indonesian figures – while there was fresh evidence of Britons acting as front directors for companies based in offshore havens such as the BVI. A senior Liberal Democrat figure said the leaks showed the secret haven of the BVI "stains the face of Britain", as anti-corruption campaigners called for action. Lord Oakeshott, the Lib Dem peer and a former Treasury spokesman, said: "How can David Cameron keep a straight face calling for the G8 to make big business pay tax when we let the BVI use British law and British protection to suck in billions in dirty money?
" Ministers insist they are not ready to act. Leaks reveal secrets of the rich who hide cash offshore | UK news. Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world, from presidents to plutocrats, the daughter of a notorious dictator and a British millionaire accused of concealing assets from his ex-wife. The leak of 2m emails and other documents, mainly from the offshore haven of the British Virgin Islands (BVI), has the potential to cause a seismic shock worldwide to the booming offshore trade, with a former chief economist at McKinsey estimating that wealthy individuals may have as much as $32tn (£21tn) stashed in overseas havens.
In France, Jean-Jacques Augier, President François Hollande's campaign co-treasurer and close friend, has been forced to publicly identify his Chinese business partner. It emerges as Hollande is mired in financial scandal because his former budget minister concealed a Swiss bank account for 20 years and repeatedly lied about it. Tories must reverse 'great socialist coup' of last decade, says Liam Fox | Politics. The Conservative party needs to reverse the "great socialist coup" of the last decade by ending welfare dependency and encouraging wealth creation by cutting taxes, the former defence secretary Liam Fox has argued.
In an unashamedly Thatcherite call to arms, Fox called for an end to the ringfencing of Whitehall departments, which would lead to dramatic cuts in NHS spending. Calling for lower taxes, Fox said: "The great socialist coup of the last decade was making wealth an embarrassment. It is not. It is the prize for aspiration and hard work, and its side effects are higher tax revenues, more jobs and more investment.
" The speech by the former defence secretary to the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) comes after Theresa May positioned herself over the weekend for a future Tory leadership by outlining her political creed in a speech that went well beyond her brief as home secretary. "People will buy houses, invest for their future or just go shopping. Serco reports 27% rise in profits | Business. Serco achieved record levels of new contracts around the world although just over half its business remains in the UK. Photograph: Jim Wileman Serco, one of Britain's biggest prison and healthcare outsourcing companies, has insisted its work for the financially stretched UK government has not grown any more lucrative in the last 12 months – despite a string of contract awards, a 25% increase in staff and a rise in its profit margin.
Major contract awards last year included an expansion to Serco's category B private prison, located alongside Belmarsh in south-east London, and a contract to run Suffolk Community Healthcare. The group also retained responsibility for jointly running Britain's nuclear warheads store at Aldermaston, Berkshire, and won six National Citizen Service contracts – part of David Cameron's "big society" initiative. Chief executive Chris Hyman said the group's UK workforce grew by more than 10,000 to 53,000 in 2012. Among p. Bonuses: the essential guide | Business. Fury at Centrica's £2.7bn dash for cash | Business. York strives to pay living wage as cuts bite and poverty spreads | Society | The Observer. British sugar giant caught in global tax scandal | Business | The Observer. TUC accuses Tory Eurosceptics of trying to undermine labour law | Politics.
The Hut avoids VAT by shipping via US | Business.