Weed out corporate tax avoiders

THE global tax system is broken. Tax havens, including British overseas tax shelters like the British Virgin Islands, are being used to hide wealth and avoid taxes on a massive scale.

The UK and some of the world’s poorest countries are being deprived of desperately needed tax revenue.

Yet, despite public outrage at the secret world revealed by the Panama Papers, little is being done to fix the problem.

The EU proposal for companies to report on their use of tax havens is full of holes. The measures announced so far by the Prime Minister fall far short of what he promised when the UK hosted the G8 summit in 2013.

Next month the UK is holding a tax and anti-corruption summit in London. David Cameron should seize that opportunity to call for greater transparency from tax havens and champion root and branch reform of global tax rules.

Demanding that British overseas tax havens publicly name the owners of the countless shell companies they host would be a good start.

Barry Johnston, ActionAid UK I AGREE with your editorial supporting the Government’s initiatives to improve tax transparency and clamp down on corporate tax avoidance [Comment, April 11].

However, we also need to demand full transparency from those oligarchs and the global super-rich who are buying up key pillars of British infrastructure.

It makes me very uncomfortable that money can buy such power and influence in modern Britain, yet we invariably know very little of how it was accumulated and whether corruption was involved. We should never lower our standards just to attract foreign capital.

Haroon Abbasi SAM Leith misses the point with regards to David Cameron [Comment, April 11].

Most observers are not suggesting he is despicable for reportedly benefiting from tax avoidance but rather that the Prime Minister has made statements, and more importantly laws, based on a partly moral basis, and he therefore must be pretty scrupulous to maintain credibility.

What’s more, the electorate chose Cameron to legislate to prevent tax avoidance from harming the country, so if he personally benefits from this, it is only right that he is rigorously questioned about it.

Even if tax avoidance is wholly legal, it is a conflict of interest which needs scrutiny.

Kathy Clark

The UK and some of the world’s poorest countries are being deprived of desperately needed tax revenue

Barry Johnston