This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Find out more here.  
  • Delicious




The OECD Is A Tax Haven Itself Says The Daily Telegraph

Jeremy Hetherington-Gore, Tax-news.com, London

03 July 2000

The Daily Telegraph's Christopher Fildes has attacked the OECD for not including itself in its list of 35 tax havens published last week.

According to Fildes, the OECD itself is a tax haven because it has diplomatic status. It occupies a sumptuous chateau in the heart of Paris, and it is exempt from French tax laws. The 29 ambassadors sent to the OECD from its 29 member nations (what about the French one?) are also tax-exempt in France.

As Fildes says, Franch tax-payers subsidise the OECD in various ways.

'You might, therefore, have thought that a sense of shame would have prevented it from denouncing 35 other tax havens, ranging from Andorra to Vanuatu by way of the Channel Islands. Not a bit of it.'

Fildes points out that the OECD is by now a solution in search of a problem: 'This is the OECD's latest ploy. Originally established to administer the Marshall Plan, it strives to justify its continued existence. It still produces useful figures, although Nigel Lawson once suggested that the International Monetary Fund should take them over and the OECD should be wound up. This proposal put paid to his chances of running the OECD.'

It is true that the OECD has overstayed its welcome, at least in its present form. During the 1980s and the early 1990s the OECD was on a level with the WTO as a force for free markets, liberalisation and globalisation in the best sense of the word.

What went wrong? The WTO, for all its problems and deficiencies (not least its pathetically small budget of $24m annually and its tiny staff of 240) has remained a strong force for free trade.

It is tempting to think that the OECD has been 'captured' by the French, the developed world's major hold-out country against le anglo-saxon agenda of free-trade, transparency and shareholders' rights.

Once the battle for free-trade seemed to be won in the afterglow of the more-or-less successful Uruguay round, perhaps the OECD succumbed to the tax-exempt fleshpots of Paris; perhaps the blandishments of the French have transformed it from being a potent commentator on economic policies into a Colbertian instrument of tax enforcement?

Whatever is the truth, it is sad to see one of the great forces for economic sanity of the late 20th century reduced to being little more than a mouthpiece for the assembled finance ministers of the EU.

.

 

 






Write a comment