Blog on Offshore Finance posted on the LSE Business

A blog by the CORPNET group can be found on the LSE Business Review website. The piece, ‘Network analysis shows offshore finance as a complex network of ownership ties’, is written by Jan Fichtner and can be found here.

Abstract

The EU made a move in August to force Apple to pay €13 billion in unpaid taxes. The episode has quickly become emblematic of the EU’s fight against corporate tax avoidance, a dispute which intensified in the aftermath of the 2009 financial crisis. As Europeans see it, this is about the need to provide a level playing field between US and EU businesses. If a UK-based retailer pays a lot more taxes than US-based Amazon, it will never be able to compete fairly. The OECD, “the organisation charged by the G8 and more recently the G20 to develop international standards as part of the fight against tax avoidance and evasion” saw its ambitions watered down after intense political pressure. In this article, CORPNET’s network analysis allows us to visualise how multinational corporations structure their ownership ties, a key element in tax avoidance.