Tax evasion

On Tuesday (26 March), the European Parliament largely backed a detailed report on financial crimes and tax avoidance in the EU. The text set a clear roadmap to tackle those […]

Swiss bank UBS, its French unit and six executives faced charges of aggravated tax fraud and money laundering on Monday, the first day of a trial into allegations they helped […]

India and Switzerland have signed a deal that would allow both to automatically share tax-related data from 2019. The Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) will be implemented on January 1, 2018; the first year will involve collection of data in accordance with global standards.

HSBC Private Bank, a Swiss unit of banking giant HSBC, has agreed to pay €300 million to avoid going to trial in France for enabling tax fraud, prosecutors said on Tuesday. HSBC was accused last year of helping French clients to hide at least €1.67 billion from the tax authorities, according to a source close to the probe.

In the wake of the leak of the “Paradise Papers”, two human rights experts from the United Nations are urging Caribbean and other states to take action against corporate tax fraud. The Paradise Papers are a set of confidential documents related to offshore investment.

The Paradise Papers document leak revealed more than 13.4 million internal documents on Sunday showing how major world players take advantage of offshore tax havens, including Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II’s private estate, media reports said on Monday. The leak, known as the Paradise Papers, comes more than a year after the Panama Papers, for which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing offshore banking practices of the world’s elite.

The data breakdown from this year’s tax returns so far confirm what Greece’s finance ministry officials were afraid all along: Declared income from freelancers dropped by 20%, compared to last year.

According to a Kathimerini newspaper report, the tax burden on professionals and freelancers has led to tax evasion. The negative development will not only have an impact on this year’s budget but future budgets too, which has generated concern at the ministry ahead of the third bailout review, especially given the International Monetary Fund’s view that Greece will not be able to achieve the target for a primary surplus of 3.5 percent of gross domestic product from next year.

International tax systems are making progress in becoming fairer and more effective, a report led by OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría has concluded.
In the report compiled ahead of the G20 summit in Hamburg this weekend, Gurria said the improvement of tax systems in global economies has been a major achievement of the group of states.