The government is pulling the bill to force Crown Dependencies to fall into line over offshore tax havens.
Ministers have pulled a financial services bill from the House of Commons, fearing the government was almost certain to be defeated on an amendment requiring Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man to clamp down on money laundering.
Quite apart from the concept of tax havens being a good thing as they encourage lower taxation via competition, the killer quote is this:
But Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, all major offshore financial centres, maintain they are self-governing territories and it is not for the UK parliament to dictate how they are regulated.
Precisely. They are self-governing territories. That’s it. Nothing more to be said. How dare the UK government seek to dictate to them. What are May and her EU chums going to do? Send in the gun boats? What we have here is the attempt by governments to set up a cartel on taxation, so that they can rip as much as possible with no alternative for those being so ripped off.
IoM, the Channel Islands, as well as Bermuda and our ex colonies in the Caribbean have all signed up to Common Reporting Standards.
http://www.oecd.org/tax/automatic-exchange/common-reporting-standard/
It’s by far the most comprehensive set of rules, involving ANY interest paid, no matter how small, together with names of beneficial owners of offshore funds or companies.
The UK gets all this every year as well as every country that’s signed up to CRS.
Only drawback is tax authorities receive literally hundreds of millions of bits of data that’d take huge amounts of time and manpower to scrutinise in detail.
In reality tax authorities only concentrate on bigger amounts of taxable assets, which is fine given interest rates are pathetic.
Anyway it looks that the proposed law was overtaken by events.
(All it means for people who have the will to keep their assets is a little more work, but it’s a breeze to circumvent).
@LR
They are not “tax havens”, they are countries with lower tax rates.
Further, as [spit] withholding tax, data sharing & KYC in place for years, HMRC & rest of EU already receive tax.
They’ve won this battle after losing many, the war continues.
I’m quite happy with the term tax haven. It’s a fairly accurate description. I believe the UK should become one.
We should have told the EU that we planned to slash taxes to compete with them. That would have made them a lot more amenable at the negotiating table. And caused Richard Murphy’s head to explode.
That alone would have been worth it.
Excellent suggestion. The man is a hypocrite of the first water. Did nicely out of property price inflation, did Richard.
Perhaps they were reminded that in the Second Unpleasantness the first thing the Crown did was to tell the Channel Islands they would not be defended, and then mucked up the evacuation ship.
While that may have been the only practical thing to do, it allowed Goebbels the opportunity to use the islands as occupation laboratories and to score a PR victory at home when he didn’t bother to distinguish the Isle of Wight from the Channel Islands. It gave the impression that not only had there been little resistance, but that the Germans had been positively welcomed on to mainland Britain(which they had not, but it is easy to make it look that way.)
FYI
Duplicitous Leaders May’s treachery?
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.brugesgroup.com/blog/duplicitous-leaders
Saved as PDF
Duplicitous Leaders
http://batsby.blogspot.com/2019/03/duplicitous-leaders.html
or
https://pastebin.com/uqF9Jd4J
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/03/06/claim-mays-secret-brexit-betrayal-pact-with-merkel/
Brief outline of what is in doc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBSE9CKdwXM
H/T https://4liberty.org.uk/2019/03/06/mays-treachery-2