Tax Avoidance and Evasion

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Wednesday 13th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gauke]

There are a few more points that I want to make, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me.

Let me address the subject of the UK’s Crown dependencies and overseas territories. Reform of the regimes of the overseas territories and Crown dependencies has been a key objective for the UK, and the reforms that we have secured have been considerable. All the UK Crown dependencies and overseas territories with financial centres are signed up as early adopters of the common reporting standard, reporting annually from 2017 in respect of data that have already been collected. The Crown dependencies and overseas territories will share information with the UK from this year, one year earlier than the rest of the world. All the UK Crown dependencies and overseas territories with a financial centre have committed to transparency on company ownership.

Last Monday the Prime Minister announced that our overseas territories and Crown dependencies have agreed that they will provide UK law enforcement and tax agencies with full access to information on the beneficial ownership of companies. For the first time, UK police and law enforcement agencies will be able to see exactly who owns and controls every company incorporated in those territories. This is a major step forward in transparency, the result of the Government’s sustained work in this area.

It is right that we expect the overseas territories and Crown dependencies to meet international standards, and indeed they do. Yes, we want them to move towards a public central register. That is not yet the international standard. If, as the Leader of the Opposition suggests, every former colony that does not have a public register should be recolonised, where would we begin? Is he proposing that we invade Delaware? [Interruption.] Now we come to mention it, says the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris).

The reality is—and this is the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) was right to raise—that the UK is in favour of a public register. We are implementing a public register in June for the first time. We have never had one before. We want other countries to do it, but very few of our European Union colleagues do so. It is not the case that the US does it. We want to ensure that it becomes the new international standard, but Orders in Council condemning overseas territories for failing to do what most of our EU colleagues do not do would not be fair or effective. The approach that we have taken has brought the overseas territories and Crown dependencies a long way. I fear that the approach advocated by the Labour party would fail to work.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Will the Financial Secretary give way?

[Mr Gauke]

I will make some more progress. The hon. Gentleman has just arrived.

As well as leading international action, we have ensured that domestically our regime is both tough and transparent. We have invested more than £1.8 billion in HMRC since 2010 to tackle evasion, avoidance and non-compliance. The £800 million extra funding that we announced in the summer Budget 2015 will enable HMRC to recover a cumulative £7.2 billion in tax over the next five years, and to triple the number of criminal investigations it can undertake into serious and complex tax crime. In the last Parliament, we made more than 40 changes to tax law, closing down existing loopholes and introducing major reforms to the UK taxation system, raising £12 billion.

Penalties increased, new offences created, loopholes closed, new measures introduced, more money raised—it does not stop there. In this Parliament, we have already announced a further 25 measures for legislation to tackle avoidance, evasion and aggressive tax planning. These measures are forecast to raise £16 billion by 2020-21. This week, we announced that we will bring before the House this year legislation to make it a crime for corporations to fail to prevent their representatives from criminally facilitating tax evasion. This new corporate offence goes further than any other country has gone in holding corporations to account for criminal wrongdoing. It will apply to both UK and overseas corporations, and will set a new standard for corporate responsibility and accountability. I am sure that Members on all sides of the House will support any measures as they go through.

What a contrast to the 13 years of the Labour Government. This week, the Opposition ramp up the rhetoric, but it was not on our watch that private equity managers had a lower rate of tax than their cleaners. It was not on our watch that the wealthy could sidestep stamp duty. It was not on our watch that high earners could disguise their remuneration as loans that were never repaid. Those are just some of the loopholes left open by Labour—loopholes that we have been busy closing ever since.

Let me make one further point about the approach of the Labour party over the past week. Yes, taxes should be paid in accordance with the law and the intentions of Parliament, and we should take action against those who fail to do so. Those of us on the Government Benches certainly hold that view. But too often in the past week, Labour has appeared to be motivated by something else. That something else is hostility to the wealthy—not for dodging taxes, but just for being wealthy, for being successful, for earning money and for wanting to pass it on to their children. Those are things which millions of people aspire to do.

Thanks to the actions that this Conservative Government have taken domestically and overseas, we are revolutionising tax transparency and putting an end to offshore tax evasion. This is strong and firm action from a Government committed to ensuring that every penny of tax that is owed is paid. I urge the House to reject the motion.

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

May I make a number of small observations on what we have heard so far and gently say to the Minister, whom I like, that success is not measured merely in monetary terms? There are many, many successful people who will forgo stashing cash in the attic, the bank or the offshore tax haven.

On HMRC, we have no problem with efficiency or with organisations being fit for purpose. We have no qualms about genuine waste being eroded, but we look askance at 17 out of 18 tax offices being closed and only one being reopened, and the argument that somehow that will deliver more for substantially less.

The shadow Chancellor spoke about wealth inequality now rising to a level that we have not seen since the days of the Rockefellers or, as he said, the robber barons. I would not put the Prime Minister in the category of the super-rich, such as the Rockefellers. We know, however—the Prime Minister has been very open about this—that he bought shares, as he described it, in a trust or a fund as part of Blairmore Holdings. He sold them some years later. He did nothing illegal at all. That episode shone a very bright light in a very murky corner of offshore tax havens. One thing that struck me was that he bought the stock in 1997 and sold it in 2010. Those dates were familiar to me. It was the entire duration of Blair, Brown and new Labour. On the underlying issue, which I know the shadow Chancellor is genuinely concerned about, and on many of the points that the Minister made at the end of his speech, the Labour party did nothing for 13 years. I am glad that this is now on the agenda in a proper and cogent way.

My hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Roger Mullin) made a number of telling points on this subject in his speech on the Second Reading of the Finance Bill on Monday. He said:

“you cannot build economic success on the back of social injustice.”—[Official Report, 11 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 115.]

He also said, quoting Adam Smith:

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”

He argued that creating such division does not bring progress, and he went on to describe how much of this division is characterised today by people in certain quarters being able to park large sums of money offshore, and the rest—the vast majority—being unable to do that.

My hon. Friend suggested that, according to Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics, tax havens hide one sixth of the world’s total private wealth—in excess of $20 trillion. Some estimates put that as high as $32 trillion, and CNN described it on Monday evening as about 6% of total global GDP. There are higher estimates. We can probably all agree that it is around $20 trillion, or 15 times UK GDP, parked offshore in tax havens—money and assets which very wealthy people and criminals can hide from the relevant tax authorities.

The revelations in the millions of documents in the Panama papers from Mossack Fonseca are but the tip of the iceberg. I am told that it is the fourth biggest law firm in Panama providing these services, which means there are three larger firms, and I presume that there are dozens, scores or hundreds of smaller firms doing the same. And it is not simply in Panama. Indeed, Panama does not even make it into the top 10 tax havens. Taken together—I do not think this situation has changed yet, notwithstanding the measures that the Government have announced—the UK and the overseas territories collectively are No. 1, outstripping even Switzerland by some margin, it is argued.

It is worth reminding ourselves that at a single address in the Cayman Islands, Ugland House, there are 19,000 registered businesses. I am certain that some of them will be legal, but many will not be. Many will be companies whose beneficial owners remain hidden from the tax authorities there, here or elsewhere. That means that income that should be the subject of taxation will go untaxed, to the detriment of public services here and elsewhere.

We have, in essence, an international system of finance that enables tax avoidance on an industrial scale, a system that hides from scrutiny the owners of vast wealth while the ordinary man, woman or business in the street does not have, and does not want, that luxury. They pay their fair share, and they simply want others to do the same. What makes it most unfair—I think this is why people are so angry—is that when assets or income are hidden and go untaxed, we all suffer as the resources we need for vital public services are reduced and squeezed.

It is also the case that much of the tax stashed in tax havens is looted from developing countries, so this is not simply an issue for the west. It is a matter of fundamental importance to those developing economies, which frankly are in even more need of the tax receipts that are effectively stolen from and then parked in tax havens around the world. That is why part of the solution must involve a global agreement on country-by-country reporting to ensure that tax authorities and others can follow the money.

The question from my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Callum McCaig) was absolutely right. We are moving to having data shared between the Crown dependencies and overseas territories and the law enforcement and tax authorities here. We think that should be public—there is absolutely no doubt about that—but it should also be shared elsewhere. If miscreants are identified by the Revenue or the police here, I hope that there will be a very swift phone call to the appropriate authorities elsewhere so that they, too, can follow the money.

[Paul Flynn]

Does the hon. Gentleman think it is significant that China has £44 billion invested in the Cayman Islands and £49 billion in the British Virgin Islands? Is not one of the reasons why the Government might not want to act against these tax havens that they are ingratiating themselves with the Chinese, who are busy destroying our steel industry?

[Stewart Hosie]

I suspect that the Chinese authorities are interested in that £93 billion just as much as we are, because I suspect that much of it is not there—how can I put this gently?—officially. They have as big a problem with money being fleeced from their system as we and other countries have with ours.

Another issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, and by my hon. Friend the Member for East Lothian (George Kerevan), is the question of where the money actually is and how it is set to work for its beneficiaries. As we know, cash funds do not actually sit in the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas. One of the biggest centres for the cash is London, and we can see where some of that money is spent. For example, hundreds, if not thousands, of rather expensive properties in London have been bought by persons unknown. We have therefore called for radical reform to address tax avoidance, outright evasion and criminality and to deliver fairness across the board so that the very wealthy pay the tax that is due in precisely the same way as those on more modest earnings.

The starting point for paying tax in this country is the Revenue knowing precisely who owns what assets and what income is derived from them. In short, that means a public register of beneficial ownership of companies, and not just in the UK, but for the Crown dependencies and the overseas territories as well, precisely so that nobody can hide assets or incomes through an opaque structure of a company registered in an overseas territory, registered by a Panamanian lawyer while the money comes swiftly to a bank account in London and is parked in a multi-million pound mansion in Mayfair through an anonymous shell company.

That also means taking serious action on trusts. The argument that the Prime Minister used was that he would not have got the agreement had trusts been included. He argued—possibly correctly historically—that those trusts were set up in order to allow sophisticated investors to invest in dollar-denominated stock. But times have changed. I took a cursory look at the stock exchange website this morning. On its “frequently asked questions” page, I saw the following question: “Can a company have its securities traded in currencies other than sterling, for example euros and dollars?” The answer was, “Yes, your shares can be denominated and traded in any freely available currency you choose.” Indeed, the stock exchange launched a Masala rupee-denominated bond last week. The old arguments that these structures are required for non-sterling trades or investment are now simply wrong. As my hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath put it, even if the Prime Minister was right some years ago, he is wrong now and public opinion has changed dramatically.

That brings me to what else the Prime Minister said on Monday. He said that he has published all the information on his tax returns for the past six years. He has provided details about money inherited from and given to him by his family. He has published other sources of income and his salary. He dealt specifically with the shares that he and his wife held in a unit trust called Blairmore Holdings, set up by his late father. That, from our point of view, was precisely the right thing to do. However, in a sense, all of that is irrelevant because it did not actually address the fundamental issue of individuals holding assets through overseas shell companies and being able to hide them and their income from the tax man.

Also, in describing the actions that the Government are taking to deal with tax evasion, aggressive tax avoidance and international corruption more broadly, the Prime Minister said that they have put an end to rich homeowners getting away without paying stamp duty because their houses are enveloped within companies. He said that they had made 40 changes to close loopholes, and they have sought agreement on global standards for the automatic exchange of information, and in June this year, as the Minister has pointed out, the UK will become the first country in the G20 to have a public register of beneficial ownership so that everyone can see who really owns and controls each company. We recognise that there has also been work on base erosion and profit shifting.

All of that is to be welcomed. What we are saying is that we need to go further. It will simply not be enough for the police and the tax authorities to see beneficial ownership of companies registered in Crown dependencies; it must be public, so that the citizens of those countries and ours can see who precisely owns and benefits from what. Also, while we welcome the publication of beneficial ownership of companies in the UK, I ask the Government to ensure that sufficient resources are now dedicated to HMRC so that it can forensically scrutinise the sources of income to ensure that they are legal and that the tax due is paid. Of course, as I said earlier, the Government must also pass on to other authorities the details of any miscreants suspected of looting cash from other countries.

I am delighted that this subject is now under real scrutiny. I am also delighted that we have gone wider than the parochial. Oxfam has pointed out how significant this is in its report “Ending the Era of Tax Havens”. It gives encouragement to the Government, stating:

“The UK is especially well placed to show leadership here because it controls or directly influences by far the largest network of tax havens in the world. This network, encompassing the UK’s Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories and centred on the City of London, is estimated to account for nearly a quarter of global financial services provided to nonresidents within a jurisdiction. Taken together, this UK entity would sit at the top of the ranking in the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index”.

That is not something we should be proud of. However, Oxfam goes on to talk about the opportunity the Government have, saying that success in tackling corruption and tax evasion could be transformative not just in terms of our revenue, but in terms of the fight against global poverty and inequality, which, for the SNP, is just as important.

I will end by saying one thing to the Government: the cat is out of the bag. This is not just about Mossack Fonseca; this is the tip of the iceberg. The public will not allow this matter to be quietly swept under the carpet again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

I am happy to start on a note of consensus with the hon. Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) and my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) that this is all about trust. The public have reacted so fiercely against recent events because there is a collapse of trust in us. The expenses scandal was a screaming nightmare, and public trust reached rock bottom. It is now subterranean—it has got worse. An examination of our standards in this House is currently taking place, and I urge every hon. Member to contribute to it. Democracy itself—the political system—is under threat.

The country is rightly angry about the unfairness in the system. The other day in the House, we heard the most insulting speech, which will deepen the sense of alienation between the Government and the Opposition. I have been here a long time and I recall an incident in which the person who made that speech revealed to the newspapers how he made some of his money. He bought the council house of an elderly gentleman in London, who I think was a neighbour, on the basis that it would appreciate greatly in value and that the neighbour would not live very long. The agreement that the hon. Member made was that he would give the tenant, who would get a discount for being there for years, the money to buy the house and then the hon. Member would inherit the house. That is Tory morality, and it is morally repugnant. It is not the right to buy, but the right to greed. That man lectured us the other day and tried to castigate those whom he described contemptuously as low achievers.

The difficulty is the gulf between what the Government say and what they do. In March 2010, the Prime Minister made an impassioned speech about how he would clean up lobbying. He knew all about it: he was a lobbyist, and he was going to sort it all out. Where are we today, six years later? The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 has been passed, life for trade unions and charities is a bit more troublesome, but the big corporate lobbyists do not have to declare who their clients are. No worthwhile reform has happened. The Prime Minister has worried the minnows in the shallows, but the great fat salmon still swim by unhindered.

There is similarly no sincerity in the Government’s determination to tackle the tax havens. I will give the House an interesting example. Lord Blencathra, who sees himself as the spokesman for the Cayman Islands, mocked the Prime Minister, saying that he had no intention of carrying out his threats to deal with tax havens and that they were a “purely political gesture”—those were Lord Blencathra’s words. We have just heard that the First Minister of the Cayman Islands is putting two fingers up to the Prime Minister. They are not going to take any notice.

Let us look at the remarkable history of Lord Blencathra. It is a fascinating story that shows the laxness of our controls in this House. In 2012 I made a complaint about his behaviour. My complaint was taken to a Committee in the other House to examine. It suggested that he was in breach of the parliamentary code of conduct. His activities included lobbying the Chancellor about taxes affecting the Cayman Islands; he also facilitated an all-expenses paid trip to the islands for three prominent Members of this House. The Committee that deals with standards in the Lords held an investigation, and produced a remarkable document. Lord Blencathra explained that he was taking £12,000 a month in payment from the Cayman Islands, but that he was not lobbying Parliament or Government, but Members—or the other way around; he gave some spurious excuse. Quite remarkably, the decision was taken in 2012 that he had not been in breach of any rules of the House.

Two years later, the contract that Lord Blencathra had signed was leaked. It appeared that he had agreed in the contract to

“Promoting the Cayman Islands’ interests in the UK and Europe by liaising with and making representations to UK ministers, the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office), Members of Parliament in the House of Commons and Members of the House of Lords.”

He put up a spirited defence, saying that he may have signed the contract but he had forgotten what he had agreed to, and anyway if he had signed it he had no intention of doing what it said. That is a most egregious breach of the code of conduct of the House—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. I have been listening very carefully. The hon. Gentleman knows that he is not to criticise Members of the other House directly or personally. He has been quoting from reports up until now. If he would desist from directly criticising Members of the other House, I would be very grateful.

[Paul Flynn]

These are not new matters, if I may say so. I have dealt with that matter now.

If the Government fail to act against their own Members, who are not trying to stop the abuses of tax havens but are actually lubricating them, how can we take them seriously? There is some agreement on this, and some pleasure in the House that this situation has happened, because it might expose the corruption that is so endemic and the huge sums disappearing into tax havens. Light has been shone on all that.

I believe that there is a political agenda behind those who have hacked into Mossack Fonseca’s site. We do not know what that agenda is, and it might well be very sinister, but I will repeat my earlier point: one of the curious things here is what is happening with other nations. China has $44 billion in the Cayman Islands and $49 billion in the British Virgin Islands. Those are huge sums of money, but they are only part of the revelations—part is still to come. The reverberations of this pivotal scandal will spread for decades.

I am curious about the Government’s reluctance to act against China in many other ways. We have already done a dreadful and financially disastrous deal over Hinkley Point, which might give us the most expensive electricity in the world, although the deal is now collapsing. The Government seem to want to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese Government. As a result, they are going soft on them in many ways. What is most damaging is that they are not taking sharp action against the undercutting of the steel industry that is affecting so many jobs here.

We have a strange relationship with the Cayman Islands. We provide them with great advantages, by providing their defence for them. The Government’s permissiveness must stop. We will look to the Government to take the tough line that they have promised at the anti-corruption conference. They have not taken it before, so let us see them do it there.

[Several hon. Members rose—]