Rear Window ... Glencore has failed in its High Court bid to stop the ATO using information in the ...
The documents included legal missives from Appleby to other firms – “Hi boys! Glencore are up to their old tricks!” one Appleby lawyer wrote of Glencore’s instruction to backdate a document. And the wizard wheeze plan to avoid paying $US11.5 million in British VAT on a jet Glencore eventually sold to Osama bin Laden’s brother.
HMM: Google Insider Turns Over 950 Pages Of Docs And Laptop To DOJ. The suggestion is that Google CEO Sundar Pichai lied to Congress when he said the algorithms were nonpolitical.
Cute and Sneaky: Mate Versus Mate: Inside ScoMo’s billion-dollar visa privatisation
Cute and Sneaky: Mate Versus Mate: Inside ScoMo’s billion-dollar visa privatisation
IRS Tax Estimator: “The IRS encourages everyone to use the Tax Withholding Estimator to perform a quick “paycheck checkup.” This is even more important following the recent changes to the tax law for 2018 and beyond. The Estimator helps you identify your tax withholding to make sure you have the right amount of tax withheld from your paycheck at work. There are several reasons to check your withholding:
- Checking your withholding can help protect against having too little tax withheld and facing an unexpected tax bill or penalty at tax time next year.
- At the same time, with the average refund topping $2,800, you may prefer to have less tax withheld up front and receive more in your paychecks.
If you are an employee, the Tax Withholding Estimator helps you determine whether you need to give your employer a new Form W-4, Employee’s Withholding Allowance Certificate (PDF). You can use your results from the Estimator to help fill out the form and adjust your income tax withholding. If you receive pension income, you can use the results from the estimator to complete a Form W-4P (PDF) and give it to your payer…”
Following up on my previous posts (links below): Do You Have to Be a Jerk to Be Great?: Navigating the Tension Between Work and Relationships, by David Brooks:
In the first place, being monomaniacal may not even be good for your work. Another book on my summer reading list was “Range,” by David Epstein. It’s a powerful argument that generalists perform better than specialists. ...
He shows the same pattern in domain after domain: People who specialize in one thing succeed early, but then they slide back to mediocrity as their minds rigidify. ...
Furthermore, living a great life is more important than producing great work. A life devoted to one thing is a stunted life, while a pluralistic life is an abundant one. This is a truth feminism has brought into the culture. Women have rarely been able to live as monads. They were generally compelled to switch, hour by hour, between different domains and roles: home, work, market, the neighborhood.
Freeports are tax havens whatever the government might say about them
This post by me was also on Left Foot Forward this morning: Boris Johnson is proposing that the UK should, post-Brexit, have at least ten
David Gamage (Indiana), Five Key Research Findings on Wealth Taxation for the Super Rich:
This essay summarizes five key findings from the author’s in-progress research evaluating the potential of wealth tax reform proposals for taxing the super rich. These five key findings are as follows:
- The existing U.S. tax system does a very poor job of meaningfully taxing the super rich.
- There are only two approaches for reform that could plausibly succeed in making it so that the U.S. tax system would meaningfully tax the super rich: wealth taxation and mark-to-market taxation (sometimes known as “accrual” taxation).
- Piecemeal reforms to the existing tax system that some have argued for as “progressive alternatives” to wealth tax reforms should be thought of as complements to wealth taxation rather than as competitors.
- Much of the public criticism of wealth tax reform proposals ignores recent legal scholarship on valuation methodologies and other implementation design options, to the extent that this criticism mostly only applies to outdated, “straw man” versions of how a modern wealth tax might be implemented.
- Concerns about the Supreme Court striking down wealth tax reforms as unconstitutional can be addressed by including fallback options in the wealth tax legislation.
Michael Guihot (Queensland), New Technology, the Death of the BigLaw Monopoly, and the Evolution of the Computer Professional:
Much has been written recently about new technology disrupting the traditional law firm model of providing legal services. Susskind and Susskind predicted the failure of professions, including the legal profession, due in large part to the external pressure of disruptive technology. However, concentrating blame on the technology is misguided; it blames the tool used to disrupt rather than the root causes of the disruption. In short, computers do not kill lawyers.
San Francisco-based Uber generated the outsized deduction before its initial public offering in May because it moved some of its offshore subsidiaries to different countries as a result of new European Union rules governing multinational companies.
The $6.1 billion deduction came through an increase in the value of intellectual property that Uber transferred between its offshore subsidiaries, according to the company’s first quarterly filing. When an intangible asset increases in value, so do the tax deductions that come with its use over time.
Welcome back!
It’s not too often we get
to feature multiple movie stars in an email from ICIJ. It’s always exciting
to see popular culture take up the challenge of illustrating the offshore
world. If by chance you’re a film buff and headed to the Venice or Toronto
film festivals in the next few weeks… let me know!!
STREEP PAPERS
Okay, that might not be what it’s called but there is a bit of
buzz around the latest depiction of the Panama Papers – The Laundromat.
This one comes to you from Steven Soderbergh who directed the film for
Netflix. It’s hitting film festivals next month (Venice, then Toronto) and
we’re excited to see Meryl Streep starring alongside Antonio Banderas and
Gary Oldman, who take on the roles of the Mossack Fonseca founders.
SWISS GUILT
A former head of HSBC’s Private Bank has pleaded guilty
to helping wealthy individuals hide $1.8 billion from French
authorities. Peter Braunwalder was fined $560,000 and received a one-year
suspended sentence. It was a rough week for the banking giant’s Swiss unit,
which also agreed to pay $329 million in Belgium to settle a criminal probe.
The charges come after our 2015 investigation, Swiss Leaks, revealed the bank
was helping clients connected with arms trafficking, blood diamonds and
bribery.
LITTLE PILLOW
Or was that Moustache? The truth has come out about the owners
of some of the novel code names we discovered during Bribery Division.
“Little Pillow” and “Moustache” were among those used to conceal the
identity of high-profile officials taking payments from
Odebrecht. We now know the former Peruvian prime minister César Villanueva
was “Curriculum Vita” and Lima’s former mayor, Susana Villarán was “Careca”
(Portuguese for bald… she had a full head of hair).
BRIBERY DOCUMENTS
The backbone of our investigation into Odebrecht, Bribery
Division, was a 2014 spreadsheet that showed more than 600 payments made by
the company’s Division of Structured Operations. (Of course, it was full of
code names.) But there were other gems
within the 13,000 leaked documents including one telling email
chain about the subway system in Quito, Ecuador, and another suggesting
payments be divided into “smaller payments” to avoid issues. Read them all,
right here.
Amy
Wilson-Chapman
ICIJ’s community engagement editor |
