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Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

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Re: Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

#51

Post by lsaferite »

higherpurpose wrote: post #33
prawn wrote: post #19

Anyone got any ideas on how governments could effectively clamp down on this? In Australia, IKEA paid 1%* tax over the last 12 years, even as sales surged 500%: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/luxembourg-tax-... (The Guardian article has since removed the 1% reference, though it was in there when I first read the article.)

I'm not saying I condone it (I especially don't like the part of routing all of your profits made in other countries through a single country with lower taxes, and don't think it's fair) - but maybe there's an argument to be made about low income tax for corporations, if that actually leads to much higher sales (on which consumers pay VAT, so tax money still goes to the government)?

Or, no income tax at all and just a sales/use tax across the board.

Re: Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

#52

Post by vidarh »

oskarth wrote: post #8
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #7

Help! On another, similar article, they have used one of my pictures, with me and my wife in it - http://www.euractiv.com/sections/competition/luxembourg-tax-... The only reason I think is because it was taken in front of the Amazon office in Luxembourg. Any suggestion on how to ask for removal, and possibly compensation for damage?

Tweet them: https://twitter.com/euractiv and https://twitter.com/DominiqueOstyn EDIT: Interesting that people are downvoting a simple "talk to them, here's how" comment. Before going all litigious and looking up the specifics of fair use for various licenses, what exactly is wrong with asking them nicely?

> Before going all litigious and looking up the specifics of fair use for various licenses, what exactly is wrong with asking them nicely?

I agree. Most likely they've just done a quick search and don't particularly care what photo they used.

Re: Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

#53

Post by lsaferite »

Shivetya wrote: post #41
prawn wrote: post #19

Anyone got any ideas on how governments could effectively clamp down on this? In Australia, IKEA paid 1%* tax over the last 12 years, even as sales surged 500%: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/luxembourg-tax-... (The Guardian article has since removed the 1% reference, though it was in there when I first read the article.)

Tax the sale of the item to the end buyer and do away with all corporate taxes? That would be easiest method but psychologically it may cause angst amount the populace when they realize just how much tax they pay on everyday purchases. going back to other stories, if and when space tourism takes off, whats to stop someone from relocating to orbit and avoiding excessive and at times abusive taxation?

I personally like the idea of dropping income taxes and switching to just sales/use tax. Compliance is simplified, tax codes are simplified, and tax avoidance is reduced. There are many practical aspect that would need to be resolved, like how do you apply this to imports and such, but those are solvable problems.

Re: Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

#54

Post by maxerickson »

vidarh wrote: post #43
tomp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He published the image online, publicly, himself. It's kind-a hard for him to claim it's violating his privacy.

EU privacy laws does not work that way. EDIT: To expand slightly: That you have published something yourself, in one context, does not automatically imply that publication in others contexts is ok. It may be sufficient in this case, because the article is hardly all that controversial, but you can not automatically assume that publication implies consent for publication elsewhere.

I wish people would give more consideration to this (whether they are legally required to or not).

Re: Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

#55

Post by mike_hearn »

return0 wrote: post #50
gutnor wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European Union is a union in a UN sense rather than USA sense. There is no European value or identity to defend, so neither Cyprus nor Luxembourg is doing anything wrong really, just playing their card and do the best for their citizen first and foremost. Cyprus found itself in a hole with no good geopolitical bargaining chips so they got screwed. All the argumentation that followed was to make the pill easier to swa…

>European Union is a union in a UN sense rather than USA sense Are you from the EU? You do know that EU law supersedes national law, right? Or that a number of southern european countries don't have control of their finances for 5+years now? It's not an inconsequential union. Also, if they are not doing nothing wrong, then i don't know if the word "wrong" has any uses anymore.

EU law functions via directives, which are implemented by governments into local law. It's a little different to the US federal system.

Those southern European countries do have direct control of their own finances. They could declare bankruptcy and start over if they wanted to. When people say they are 'controlled' by Germany or whatever, those people are in a lazy and misleading way saying that those countries preferred to get loans from other countries and submit to those lenders requirements rather than immediately make their spending match their tax revenues ... because borrowing is easier, politically. But that's still a free choice they made.

WRT wrongness, you seem to believe that any country which charges a lower tax rate than any other country is somehow immoral? You want a global government that sets a single tax rate for every person and company on earth? That's one way to avoid people playing jurisdictional arbitrage, but I don't see anyone arguing for that.

Re: Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

#56

Post by tomp »

vidarh wrote: post #43
tomp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He published the image online, publicly, himself. It's kind-a hard for him to claim it's violating his privacy.

EU privacy laws does not work that way. EDIT: To expand slightly: That you have published something yourself, in one context, does not automatically imply that publication in others contexts is ok. It may be sufficient in this case, because the article is hardly all that controversial, but you can not automatically assume that publication implies consent for publication elsewhere.

> you can not automatically assume that publication implies consent for publication elsewhere.

I'm not automatically assuming that - the guy explicitly licensed his photo as CC-By-Sa - I don't think any reasonable person would assume that means "don't republish" or "republish, but only where I approve"!

Re: Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

#57

Post by mike_hearn »

lsaferite wrote: post #53
Shivetya wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax the sale of the item to the end buyer and do away with all corporate taxes? That would be easiest method but psychologically it may cause angst amount the populace when they realize just how much tax they pay on everyday purchases. going back to other stories, if and when space tourism takes off, whats to stop someone from relocating to orbit and avoiding excessive and at times abusive taxation?

I personally like the idea of dropping income taxes and switching to just sales/use tax. Compliance is simplified, tax codes are simplified, and tax avoidance is reduced. There are many practical aspect that would need to be resolved, like how do you apply this to imports and such, but those are solvable problems.

Most countries use VAT rather than sales tax, which is generally agreed by people who specialise in tax incidence to be better, but comes with its own interesting forms of evasion (see "carousel fraud").

Phasing out corporation tax entirely would be impossible for most countries to do quickly because such a huge part of their budgets come from that. In the UK it's about 25% I believe and the government there is still spending far, far more than it takes in via tax, so losing 25% of that revenue is a non-starter, and making it up with higher personal income taxes would be politically impossible: even if you could prove mathematically it was equivalent or better to do that, people feel very strongly that there exists an "us vs them" relationship between people and companies, where "us" often includes the government. This is despite that most people work for companies, and there's lots of evidence governments should sometimes be in the "them" bucket.

I don't really know where societies go from here with corporation tax - there are so many good arguments against it, but it's sort of like trying to give up smoking. You can argue all you want but lots of countries just aren't going to do it.

The first step would be to get western state finances more balanced though. Once governments aren't ballooning their debt, more complex arguments about taxation become possible to make. Whilst they're all spiralling the drain it's too hard.

Re: Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

#58

Post by vidarh »

tomp wrote: post #56
vidarh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU privacy laws does not work that way. EDIT: To expand slightly: That you have published something yourself, in one context, does not automatically imply that publication in others contexts is ok. It may be sufficient in this case, because the article is hardly all that controversial, but you can not automatically assume that publication implies consent for publication elsewhere.

> you can not automatically assume that publication implies consent for publication elsewhere. I'm not automatically assuming that - the guy explicitly licensed his photo as CC-By-Sa - I don't think any reasonable person would assume that means "don't republish" or "republish, but only where I approve"!

First of all, I was responding to your statement that publication in one context is sufficient to imply that there's no privacy issue. It is not that clear cut - privacy is not binary.

The recent controversy over the "right to be forgotten" is a good illustration: The "right to be forgotten" is not something that is explicitly part of law, but the result of an interpretation of EU privacy rights and the interplay with freedom of expression. The outcome of which was a judgement to allow people to reduce the level of exposure of information even when that information was already out there, and despite deciding that removing the information from the source in that case was going too far.

Secondly, copyright is by no means the only law that governs your ability to publish something, and in Europe "any reasonable person" ought to at least consider that depending on their specific country and specific circumstances they may run afoul of one or more other laws if they republish without checking with the photographer and subjects in the case of photographs that includes people.

The license only governs the rights to reproduce the image, but depending on other laws and situations, privacy rights, moral rights (droit d'auteur/authors rights) and portrait rights may all come into play (moral rights belong to the author (photographer); portrait rights lie with the subject - both are usually non-transferrable in the countries that recognise them; basic moral rights are explicitly recognised by the Berne convention).

Re: Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

#59

Post by Jekyll »

honeybooboo123 wrote: post #45
vidarh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily that simple. The European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8 grants a right to privacy. It is not clear whether or not the right under copyright law to copy an image is always sufficient to give you a right to publish the image. That depends on jurisdiction. In the UK, for example, it does not, as a result of the way ECHR has been implemented in local law through the Human Rights Act 1998, tho…

> The European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8 grants a right to privacy. The Fourth Amendment grants "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures", except that it doesn't , as evidenced by "Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes": http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigati…

I don't really see how people have down-voted you other than the fact that they don't agree with your opinion and I really don't think that should be an excuse to just grey out someone's opinion unless it is downright stupid/misinformed/ or extremely offensive.

Is it not better to have the opinion visible and actually have a constructive argument about that vs down-voting it to the point at it is barely readable.

Re: Leaked Documents Expose Global Companies’ Secret Tax Deals in Luxembourg

#60

Post by vidarh »

honeybooboo123 wrote: post #45
vidarh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not necessarily that simple. The European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8 grants a right to privacy. It is not clear whether or not the right under copyright law to copy an image is always sufficient to give you a right to publish the image. That depends on jurisdiction. In the UK, for example, it does not, as a result of the way ECHR has been implemented in local law through the Human Rights Act 1998, tho…

> The European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8 grants a right to privacy. The Fourth Amendment grants "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures", except that it doesn't , as evidenced by "Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes": http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigati…

Presumably you were downvoted because the comment completely derails from what was under discussion. (EDIT: For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you, but I did think it was a bit of a weird digression)

And while I agree with you in theory that "laws don't "actually grant any rights", that's a matter of ideology. For all practical intents, they do.

E.g. in the specific case of the European Convention on Human Rights, it has the effect of granting rights by preventing signatories that have subordinated themselves to it from enforcing laws that try to take those rights away. The UK for example, have had parts of terror legislation struct down as a result, and have complied.

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