Going to Tax Havens, by Jordi Guan

One of the questions, perhaps a bit naive, that many opinion-makers have been asking in recent months is to what extent the human and economic catastrophe caused by the coronavirus could give birth to a new global governance that would struggle to end grievances. The inequality that exists on this planet. Reality does not seem to work that way, and the world today is full of regimes that are dictatorships masquerading as pseudo-democracy. We are even witnessing actions that we have not seen before, such as the hijacking of an ordinary airliner in the middle of a flight to arrest a dissident, as happened in Belarus.

But not everything seems lost. Yesterday’s decision by the finance ministers of the Group of Seven industrialized nations, which includes Canada, the United States, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, to set a comprehensive minimum tax on large corporations, is a good, long-standing decision – news in the line of trying to build a fairer world. It did not make sense that for many years giant multinational corporations (and not only technology companies) could choose the country that offered them the best tax conditions for paying taxes. The agreement seeks to have companies pay in the countries where they sell their products and not in the countries where they report their profits. Behind this decision, there is the many years of work of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and it is the person who was pushing the G-20 and G-7 to make this decision. The goal of introducing this type of comprehensive corporate tax was to hit 25% of profits, but was eventually limited to 15%. This is better than nothing.

If the initiative ends up in the following sessions of these forums, already with the respective heads of government, now is the time to get fully into another major financial scandal: the existence of tax havens. It seems inconceivable that there are still companies making fun of their countries’ farms with companies Navy In places with low or no taxes. Today’s data technology prevents the impunity of the past. Everything is known and known. Therefore, the only thing missing is the political will to end this practice.