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Friday, September 15, 2017

Labour claims hundreds of schools could have been built with tax avoidance cash

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide,” pioneering conservationist and marine biologist Rachel Carson wrote in the 1937 masterpiece that inspired a new aesthetic of lyrical science writing





THIS month Gerhard Schröder starts a new job. Shareholders in Rosneft, a Russian energy giant with a market value of nearly $60bn, are set to appoint Germany’s ex-chancellor as a board director on September 29th. Russia’s government, Rosneft’s majority-owner, nominated Mr Schröder, who is pals with Vladimir Putin. Despite Western sanctions imposed on the firm after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Mr Schröder’s move is no surprise. He has worked for years with Gazprom, another energy arm of the Russian state, to promote a gas pipeline to western Europe.
His ties to Russia win him few friends at home. His successor as Germany’s leader, Angela Merkel, calls his behaviour “not OK”. She also vows to reject offers of “any posts in industry once I am no longer chancellor”. Other politicians are happier to follow Mr Schröder’s example. It emerged last month that a former German president, Christian Wulff (pictured), is also employed by a foreign company. He advises...Why do European companies bother to hire ex-politicians?


Australian business leaders do not need to look far into the future to see the newest wave of digital disruption headed towards them. Analytics and exponentials technologies are all around us, but are Australian businesses ready?
The post Is your board ready for the robots? appeared first on Blog | Deloitte Australia




Do public servants know satire when they see it?
The federal government wants to bring in stiff new criminal penalties for impersonating any kind of Commonwealth entity, in addition to an existing prohibition on pretending to be a public official.

While the Federal Trade Commission can impose fines on Equifax for security breaches, they have been in the wet noodle lashing category. As the New York Times pointed out last week:
Non-bank companies, like the credit bureaus, generally are scrutinized only after something has gone wrong...




Edward Kleinbard (USC), The Right Tax at the Right Time, 20 Fla. Tax Rev. ___ (2017):
The companion paper to this (Capital Taxation in an Age of Inequality, 90 S. Cal. L. Rev. 593 (2017)) argues that a moderate flat-rate (proportional) income tax on capital imposed and collected annually has attractive theoretical and political economy properties that can be harnessed in actual tax instrument design. This paper continues the analysis by specifying in detail how such a tax might be designed.





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