Размышления женщины о геополитике - страница 18

The UNCTAD draws a deplorable conclusion. «The international tax architecture has failed, so far, to properly adapt to this reality, thereby allowing a massive hemorrhaging of public revenues. The opacity surrounding tax havens may partly explain the difficulties faced by policymakers in collecting public revenues, but the main obstacle is political: the major providers of financial secrecy are to be found in some of the world’s biggest and wealthiest countries, or in specific areas within these countries. Indeed, offshore financial centres and the secrecy jurisdictions that host them are fully integrated into the global financial system, channelling large shares of trade and capital movements, including FDI»45.

The Tax Justice Network (TJN) in its report «The Financial Secrecy Index» states that an estimated $21 to $32 trillion of private financial wealth is located, untaxed or lightly taxed, in secrecy jurisdictions around the world46. The Christian Aid’s research has found that FTSE100 companies have created 29,891 subsidiaries. The research also highlights heavy use of tax havens by FTSE100 companies. More than 90 per cent of their subsidiaries are based in places defined as «secrecy jurisdictions’47.

With minor differences all above mentioned definitions feature three main characteristics of offshore financial centres, namely, 1) low or zero tax rates, 2) high secrecy or lack of transparency and 3) providing these benefits to non-residents. The current anti-offshore crusade is concentrated on cracking down these artificially created advantages, which inflict harmful tax competition. The main battlefields are tackling base erosion and profit shifting, unveiling beneficial ownership and promoting transparency.

Historic background of the modern international tax law

First concerns about the role of tax havens in money laundering and tax evasion had been arisen as early as at the beginning of 1920^>th. Many national and international rules addressing double taxation of individuals and companies have been originated from the principles developed by the League of Nations in the 1920s. However, it took the international community almost a century to join forces in combating tax avoidance via offshores.

Initially, international legislative efforts were focused on preventing double taxation in order to promote international investment process. During 1923—1927, a group of international experts under auspices of the League of Nations drafted the Bilateral Convention for the Prevention of Double Taxation in the Special Matter of Direct Taxes dealing with income and property taxes, the Bilateral Convention for the Prevention of Double Taxation in the Special Matter of Succession Duties, the Bilateral Convention on Administrative Assistance in Matters of Taxation and the Bilateral Convention on [Judicial] Assistance in the Collection of Taxes. This work led to drawing up the first Model bilateral convention (1928) and later on the Model Conventions of Mexico (1943) and London (1946). Neither of these Model Conventions, however, was fully and unanimously accepted.

Specifically, the League of Nations group decided that international tax issues should be addressed not by a multilateral global agreement, but at bilateral level. As a result, since the 1920s countries had signed thousands of bilateral «double-tax treaties» that followed the general League of Nations guidelines of source-based taxation and arm’s length pricing, but differed in a myriad of specific ways. While international trade was governed by a multilateral agreement since 1947, namely, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), to date no such a multilateral treaty exists for corporate taxes