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This paper aims to examine tax leakages in secrecy financial centres.

This qualitative study relies on primary data from relevant statutes and secondary data from the public domain and in particular academic sources. The study makes concurrent use of the case study approach.

The study reinforces existing suggestions that tax evasion is significantly widespread from advanced to emerging economies. It also suggests serious enforcement difficulties because of light-touch surveillance among competing tax havens and financial professionals. Further, while relevant laws are in place to deal with illicit activities, enhanced transparency is needed to quell the problem and, in this instance, public access to beneficial owner data such as exemplified by UK’s public registry approach. The US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act is proving to be effective, and similar expectations are raised for the equivalent the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development initiative from 2017 onwards.

The paper is constrained with the general limitations associated with qualitative studies. These are, however, mitigated by triangulations of perspectives and so on.

The findings have implications for policymakers and the business community.

The findings could help to narrow inequality gaps between and within economies.

The paper combines insights from high-profile cases with those from academic sources. The analysis is also undertaken from the combined perspectives of law, economics and accounting. It also focuses in secrecy issues in both offshore and onshore financial centres.

Recent research shows that financial institutions in the European Union (EU) close branches, offices and correspondent connections to jurisdictions with less transparency due to possible sanctions related to the increase in EU money laundering regulation. This tendency is called de-risking and the purpose of this paper is to analyze whether the recent regulatory approach towards money laundering in the EU limits the incentive to have operations in tax havens.

This paper follows a functional approach to law and economics.

The paper finds that recent EU money laundering regulation increase an incentive for financial institutions to limit any connection to jurisdictions known as tax havens, where transparency is at minimum. Thereby, it can be discussed whether the spillover effect from money laundering regulation in to the fight of tax avoidance could support further regulatory interference.

The recent trend of de-risking in light of money laundering regulation is scarcely covered by present research. Furthermore, there has been no linking of this de-risking tendency and the effects or relation to the use of tax havens/low tax jurisdictions.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the activities of tax havens in the global financial markets and explore their role in providing a supply‐side stimulant for corrupt practices. It aims to argue that the corruption debate needs to shift to a second phase in which the role of tax havens as supply‐side stimulants features more prominently.

Based on the author's original research into the practices and activities of tax havens, the paper explores the operational features of tax havens, with particular focus on their role in providing opaque and complex offshore structures through which illicit financial flows can be routed to disguise their origins, method of transfer and true beneficial ownership. The paper explores how bankers, lawyers and accountants create complex and opaque offshore structures to facilitate economic crime and impede investigation.

Despite severe limitations imposed by the absence of rigorously researched statistical data on capital flows into and out of tax havens, the paper argues that the available data support the view that tax havens have become prominent features of the globalised capital markets, and their activities create a criminogenic environment in which illicit financial flows are easily disguised and hidden amongst legitimate commercial transactions. The paper notes that effective remedies are available to reduce financial market opacity, but political will is lacking to take effective action.

This paper tackles a new and under‐researched subject. Drawing on the author's experiences of working on a prominent tax haven for a total of 14 years, the paper brings attention to the impact of tax havens on international development.

This paper is an effort to demystify tax havens – what they mean, what they offer and why they are harmful. It offers a detailed analysis of abusive tax planning by multinational corporations, involving the use of tax havens, shedding light on how corporations use “egregious” tax-sheltering techniques right from their incorporation to avoid payment of income taxes. The paper also discusses global efforts against the phenomenon and policy recommendations.

The paper brings together definitions from various sources to accurately define and identify tax haven economies. The key contribution of the paper is to diagrammatically explain the use of tax havens by MNCs right from the time they are incorporated. It explains how every big and small corporate decision is motivated by the desire to save taxes and how tax havens come in handy for such corporations.

This paper finds that base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) is a pervasive phenomenon, largely due to the suppliers of tax haven operations. Here, corporate decisions are divided into strategic and operational and further subdivided into investing, operating and financing activities, and provide real-life corporate examples of how tax havens fit into almost every corporate decision. This is the key contribution of the paper.

This is a review paper that sums up knowledge about tax havens and their use by MNCs. It does not, however, use empirical data to corroborate its findings. It would be interesting to see empirically whether MNCs with greater tax haven operations actually have lower effective tax rates.

The paper can provide a framework for designing tax policies in a manner that geographical arbitrage can be minimized. It can enable formulation of the necessary incentive structures in the form of penalties, rewards and the like for both the users and providers of tax haven services to curb massive base and profit shifting out of high-tax countries.

The paper is one small step in the direction of bringing about equality in tax payments, i.e. to align real tax systems with the canon of equality that Adam Smith once dreamt of. Taxes should be progressive in nature, implying that the amount of taxes paid should increase with one’s income. However, with the advent of offshore financial centres and egregious tax planning techniques, only the smaller corporations and middle-class individuals end up paying taxes, while the rich and bigger corporations get away easily.

The paper explores in detail the manner in which MNCs use, rather exploit, regulatory loopholes in tax systems of different countries to save on tax payments. By shifting their tax base from one country to another, MNCs not only hamper Treasury collections but also breed disrespect for the global tax system. The paper can help in designing tax laws in tune with such corporate motives.

The purpose of this paper is to test the widely‐held assumption that blacklisting, such as that practiced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), affects the volume of financial activity associated with a tax haven.

ARIMA (autoregressive integrated moving average) analysis is used to explore changes across eight measures of in banking‐associated activity that occurred when a tax haven was placed on, or removed from, one FATF and two OECD blacklists.

The results are highly varied. Most importantly, no substantial and consistent impact of blacklisting on banking investment in and out of the tax havens was found across 38 jurisdictions.

The role of “speech acts” – unconnected with other developments in the havens or foreign actions beyond rhetoric – may not be as important for tax haven investment as previously thought.

No rigorous and comprehensive study has previously been done of this important question.

The mobilising domestic resources, in particular, taxation, is key to unlocking the resources required for public investment in infrastructure, growth and sustainable finance. This study aims to share the perception that the tax arrangements of states and the transnational corporations (TNCs) of developed states have a critical effect on the development prospects of the less powerful states in developing countries.

This paper locates the role of TNCs tax practice within the broader dynamics of globalisation and the pursuit of profits, to argue that the drive of TNCs for higher profits can enrich our understanding of why some TNCs engage in tax dodging. This paper used publicly available evidence to shed light on the role played by TNCs in tax dodging practices in developing countries.

The evidence shows that tax havens and offshore financial centres, shaped by globalisation, are major structures facilitating the sophisticated tax schemes of highly mobile TNCs. This paper further shows that the corrosive effect of low-tax jurisdictions (“tax havens”) continues to represent a major obstacle to a regulation of global economic relations, which is required for maintaining sustainable social and economic development of poorer states.

This paper used publicly available evidence to illuminate the role played by TNCs in tax dodging practices in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper, therefore, advocates a radical reform that could minimise the attendant problems created by the activities of TNCs and the enabling structures that facilitate these practices.

Tax dodging has played a major role in causing serious damage to the economic and social landscape in developing countries. This in turn, has undermined social welfare and also investment in the public services, thereby eroding the quality of life and producing a decline in average life expectancy.

This paper is a general review of literature and evidence on contemporary developmental issues.

This paper aims to assess the role of secrecy jurisdictions in providing supply-side stimulants for illicit financial flows from developing countries and how the tax havens structures shape the role of actors. Specifically focussing on decades of trade liberalisation and markets, and of increasingly rapid movement of people, capital and information across regions and around the globe, the paper draws on the political economy theory of globalisation to illuminate the connections between capital flight, money laundering and global offshore financial centres (OFCs).

The paper uses publicly available evidence to shed light on the role played by tax havens in facilitating money laundering, capital flight and corruption. The issues are illustrated with the aid of case studies.

The evidence shows that, in pursuit of organisational and personal interest, the tax havens create enabling structures that support illicit activities of the political and economic elites from developing countries. The paper further argues that the supply-side of corruption severely limits the possibilities of preventing corruption in developing countries.

The paper uses publicly available evidence to illuminate the role played by OFCs in facilitating elite corruption and money laundering practices.

It is impossible to quantify the volume of money laundered, but it has been estimated that money laundering may account for as much as 5% of the world economy.

The paper, therefore, suggests that unless this supply-side of corruption is tackled there is little prospect for an end to aid dependency and the creation of economically stable and democratic states in developing countries.

The paper examines predatory practices of the international financial industry in tax havens and OFCs in facilitating money laundering, corruption and capital flight and the challenges posed for the economic development of developing countries.

The purpose here is to show how the “shadow” economy has grown in scale and impetus in recent years, though even before modern times it has been present (e.g. the City of London, Shaxson, 2011) since at least the middle ages. The reasons for this have become complicated, but we can identify some “deep structures” that are common. Firstly, “globalisation” made it easier for multinationals to escape national regulatory regimes. Secondly, one of the ways neoliberal trading regulations allowed such actors to augment their assets was by means of what they initially called “transfer-pricing” but which now is officially known as “profit shifting” through tax havens. Thirdly, the growth in international trade in legal and illegal ways caused money laundering – even by otherwise respectable banks – to grow across borders. Conversely, from the supply-side, tax haven status was increasingly accessed by jurisdictions that sought to achieve economic growth by supplying tax haven services, both Delaware and Ireland as exemplars of a “developmental” fiscal policy.

This paper adopts a “pattern recognition” design, an approach that is abductive, meaning interpretive, as shown in the observation that explanation can be valid or reliable without direct observation. This is shown in the indirect observation that “rain fell because the terrace has puddles” or “ancient glaciers once carved this valley”.

Reviewing the European Union’s (EU) list of non-co-operating jurisdictions in support of the OECD’s review of base erosion and profit-shifting activity, Collin concluded the EU’s listing “moved the needle” somewhat but was only a modest success. This is because of its reluctance to sanction its own members or large economies like the USA. Data on foreign direct investment and offshore banking assets suggest listed jurisdictions did not suffer notably from being named and shamed. In all cases studied, this contribution found legally damaging, fraudulent, conflict of interest and corrupt practice activities everywhere.

The originality is found in three spheres. Firstly, the pattern recognition method was vindicated in yielding hard to research results. Secondly, the “assemblage-thirdspace” theory was found advantageous in demonstrating the uneven geography of tax haven clusters and their common history in turbocharging economic development. Finally, the empirics showed the ruses executed by cluster members in tax havens to circumvent the law from global management consultancies to micro-firms consisting of tax lawyers and other experts interacting in knowledge supply chains of dubious morality.

The study is intended to identify the macroeconomic factors that drive the use of companies registered in tax havens to purchase properties in the UK housing market.

Adopts an empirical study that uses Cointegration and Vector Autoregressive models to identify the influence or the motivations of using tax havens regime and its relationship with investment volume by analysing impulse responses of innovations to external and domestic factors.

The model uses monthly data for the period 1996–2019. This provides sufficient evidence that offshore buyers are particularly motivated by exchange values and the quality of governance in host economies.

There is much to be revealed from the spatial distribution of this phenomena and the welfare effect at the micro-level.

To the best of my knowledge there is limited to no empirical study that primarily focus on the use of tax haven as an offshore investment tool in the UK housing market. The study also uses new dataset, Overseas Companies Ownership Dataset in the UK to understand housing ownership patterns by companies that are registered abroad dubbed, offshore buyers.

This paper has the purpose of being a preliminary exploration of the link between taxation and the contemporary assault on the financial aspect of terrorism.

This is a discussion paper.

Locating the origins of the link in the terrorist attacks of September 2001, it considers the ramifications of the fusion of taxation and international tax havens with terrorist finance.

The paper considers the link between taxation and the financial aspect of terrorism.