Oral Answers to Questions

Stewart Hosie Excerpts

Tuesday 19th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

First, we are introducing a register of the beneficial ownership of companies and trusts that need to pay tax, and of course banks must therefore comply with it. Secondly, we are introducing—this will be in the Queen’s Speech—a new criminal offence of facilitating tax evasion, which will apply to the corporate sector in Britain as well. That is in addition to the criminal offence we have introduced that says ignorance is no defence when someone comes before the courts if it is found that they have been evading taxes.

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

Tax havens lead to a loss of revenue here as individuals can hide through opaque structures and businesses simply do not pay UK tax in respect of where economic activity takes place. Given the revelations from Mossack Fonseca, has the Treasury carried out a new assessment to calculate the scale and size of the revenue lost to the UK?

[Mr Osborne]

There are already a large number of ongoing investigations in respect of Panama, which we hope will lead to prosecutions, and the Government already had data on Mossack Fonseca. If there is additional information available in the Panama papers—despite our requests, the media organisations have not yet handed all that information over to us—we will act on it.

[Stewart Hosie]

Can I ask the Chancellor to be more assertive and to go much further? Mossack Fonseca is the fourth biggest such firm in Panama, and I presume that there are dozens, scores or hundreds of smaller ones, and there will be many, many more in other countries. The scale and scope of this are likely to be astronomical. He and the Government need to go much further. We need to have a much clearer understanding of the scale of this. I ask him to make all the representations he can to the Panamanian authorities and other jurisdictions where similar activities are taking place.

[Mr Osborne]

To be frank, representations are not going to be enough with some of these jurisdictions. That is why we want international agreement to a blacklist that jurisdictions will go on if they do not comply with the norms that we are establishing on transparency, exchange of information and the like. Once they are on the blacklist, they are subject to penalties and punitive action—sanctions, if you like—so that it is clear that they cannot carry on doing business in the way they have been. If the whole world comes around on that—there was welcome support for this British-promoted concept at the G20 last week in Washington—so that we get that blacklist and that punitive action, I think that we will help to solve this problem.