(5) The Panama Papers made one thing very clear: Tax havens, meaning countries or independent areas where taxes are levied at a low rate, are ubiquitous. So much so that avoiding them is nearly impossible, Nicholas Shaxson explained in his exposé on the world's tax havens for the Guardian.
"See if you can dodge all my bear traps, and declare yourself untainted by tax havens. If you succeed, you win my Hermit of the Year prize," Shaxson writes of the pervasiveness of these loopholes:
Do you celebrate Christmas? If you do (or even if you do not), did you buy any gifts on Amazon last December? If so, then your goods were quite likely to have been routed through a byzantine world hosted – only on paper, you understand – by the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where Amazon has located its European headquarters, slashing its tax bills around the world. In 2011, Amazon revealed that the US Internal Revenue Service was chasing it for $1.5bn in back taxes. More recently, Amazon has said it will stop routing its UK sales through Luxembourg.
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Let’s cut this challenge short. Did you at any point consume the services of any of these: AIG, Aviva, Barclays, Black & Decker, British American Tobacco, Burberry, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Facebook, FedEx, GlaxoSmithKline, Ikea, HSBC, JP Morgan, Microsoft, Pepsi, Skype, Starbucks, Vodafone or Walt Disney? This is just my quirky personal selection from a list of more than 350 multinationals whose convoluted tax schemes were revealed last November by a whistleblower, working for one accountancy firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), in one European tax haven, Luxembourg.
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