Содержание:

1. Original article. 3

The row over taxing tech firms heats up. 3

2. Summary. 6

3. Synopsis. 7

4. Glossary. 11

5. References. 13

Фрагмент текста работы:

1. Original article

Has the Vatican cleaned up its
finances?

SMALL EUROPEAN enclaves have given financial
regulators big headaches in the past. Two of them, San Marino and the Vatican,
will be visited by inspectors from Moneyval, the organisation set up to fight
money-laundering and terrorist funding in Europe, in the final days of
September. They will arrive at a delicate moment. Starting next spring, the
European Union (EU) plans to pour about €209bn ($245bn) into Italy in order to
help it recover from the covid-19 pandemic. Even allowing for inflation and
economic growth, that is more than was invested in the country through the
post-war Marshall Plan.

Much of the EU cash will be directed towards the
poorer south of Italy. But that is where Italy’s mafias can most easily steer
funds and contracts their way. Having two inadequately regulated mini-states on
their doorstep would offer them an easy way to launder their gains. On a recent
visit to Rome Catherine De Bolle, the executive director of Europol, warned
that her organisation had detected a rise in organised crime’s penetration of
the European economy and asked EU states to be particularly vigilant with
regard to the recovery funds.

As Moneyval made clear in its last report in 2015, San
Marino has made significant progress towards installing a robust anti-money-laundering
system. But the Holy See looks more problematic, despite Pope Francis’s avowed
intention of overhauling its tangled finances. Two controversies are swirling.
The first has to do with the Vatican Bank, properly known as the Institute for
the Works of Religion (IOR), a lender located within the city state. The second
concerns a judicial investigation into dealings by the Roman Curia, the central
administration of the Catholic church, the effects of which have rippled
abroad.

Inspectors had hoped that the Vatican Bank was no
longer a problem. In a report on the Holy See in 2017, Moneyval concluded that
its anti-money-laundering procedures were “firmly established”. Yet the IOR is
now ensnared in litigation, which ironically arises from the clean-up.

In March a Maltese court authorised three companies
involved in a dispute with the bank to seize assets worth €29.5m— equivalent to
more than three-quarters of the IOR’s profits in 2019. The two Malta-based
investment companies and a Luxembourg-based subsidiary claim that, following a
change of management, the IOR reneged on a commitment to invest €33m in the
purchase and development of the building that once housed the Budapest Stock
Exchange. (The IOR contends that the deal was altered in a way that prejudiced
its interests and claims to have incurred losses and lost profits of up to
€25.2m.)

Another controversy relates to the Curia. Several
Vatican officials, clerical and lay, are being investigated by the city state’s
prosecutors in connection with the purchase of a building in London that was
partly financed using donations from the faithful. Prosecutors are reportedly
considering bringing charges that could include extortion. In October 2019
Vatican gendarmes raided the offices of the department that bought the
property: the Secretariat of State, the pre-eminent branch of the Vatican
bureaucracy, which combines the roles of prime minister’s office and foreign
ministry.

Most damagingly for the Vatican’s international
credibility, the Holy See’s own regulatory authority was also raided in
connection with the case and its director, Tommaso Di Ruzza, put under
investigation. Why remains unclear; no charges have since been brought against
any of the suspects. Now known as the Supervisory and Financial Information
Authority, the Vatican’s regulator combines the roles of banking watchdog and
financial-intelligence unit (FIU). Documents and data seized by the police
included confidential information that foreign FIUs had sent to the Vatican.
The Egmont Group, a network of most of the world’s FIUs, promptly excluded the
Vatican regulator from its information-sharing mechanism and only reinstated it
after the authority had brokered a deal with the prosecutors aimed at
preventing similar episodes in future.

Содержание:

CONTENTS

1. Original
article. 3

The row over
taxing tech firms heats up. 3

2. Summary. 5

3. Synopsis. 6

4. Glossary. 9

5. References. 10

Фрагмент текста работы:

1. Original article

The row over taxing tech firms
heats up.

When g20 finance ministers meet on July 18th and 19th,
avoiding a new trade war will be high on the agenda. Cash-strapped governments
around the world are planning to whack taxes on online services. But America
regards these as a grab for its companies’ profits, and is considering
retaliation against ten digital-tax proposals. On July 10th it said it would
respond to France’s tax by hitting French handbags, lipstick and soap with
tariffs of 25%. Unless a truce is struck, the tariffs will go into effect in
January.

The root cause of the dispute is a flaw in the
international tax system. In order to avoid taxing businesses twice,
governments typically apply the corporate tax to firms that are legally
domiciled on their shores or have a local physical base, and link the amount
due to the location of their assets and production. But now many companies
provide online services and can shift intellectual property to low-tax regimes
with the click of a button. A system intended to stop profits being taxed too
much allows them to be taxed too little.

In 2017 40% of profits made by
multinational firms outside their home country were shifted to tax havens,
reckon Thomas Torslov, now at the Danish Ministry of Taxation, and Ludvig Wier and
Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley. That meant more
than $200bn in forgone tax revenue, equivalent to 10% of global corporate-tax
receipts. This is a relatively small amount: by comparison, governments
worldwide have unleashed stimulus of $5.4trn in response to covid-19. But
it is symbolically important and rightly irks taxpayers, who must fill the
hole.

For several years now, the oecd, a club of rich countries, has convened
governments in the hope of plugging the tax leaks. The idea is that
the G20 meeting lays the groundwork so that the oecd’s summit, planned for October, yields results.

The talks cover two proposals, or
“pillars”, in oecd-speak. The first is meant to
direct more of the global-tax take towards places where the customers of
digital firms live. Corporate-tax liability will depend not on whether
companies are physically present in a country, but on whether they have a
“sustained and significant involvement” there. Pillar two establishes a global
minimum tax. The oecd reckons that the two
proposals could together raise corporate-tax revenue by up to 4%.

Pillar two has the greater chance
of being agreed—and would raise more revenue. The idea of a global minimum is
to blunt companies’ incentives to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions. There
is still some haggling to be done. But some sort of agreement should be
possible, if only because governments can go it alone. The Americans, for
example, enacted a version in 2017, with a tax on global intangible low-taxed
income (gilti). Havens can offer all the perks they want, but
American companies still face a rate of at least 10.5% on gilti associated with their foreign affiliates.