UK business leaders are most worried about red tape, not the oil price
Telegraph.co.uk
Russell Hotten

Never mind today's oil crisis summit in Saudi Arabia or the European Union's Lisbon Treaty. They may be top of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's agenda, but it seems that what Britain's business leaders really want him to discuss is the burden of tax and red tape.

The legitimacy of the role of tax havens
Thierry AFSCHRIFT
Early this year, the German police carried out a great many raids on taxpayers in this country. They were going on a list they had bought for over €4,000,000 from a former employee of a Liechtenstein bank. Apparently, this is a list of names of German taxpayers who have set up, or were beneficiaries, of foundations operating in Liechtenstein. In the way the affair was covered by most of the media, the Principality of Liechtenstein was complicit in the fraud or tax evasion perpetrated by taxpayers residing in Germany or other European countries.

Taxation and the fiscally footloose
Financial Times

When public finances are under pressure, increasing business taxes can seem like costless revenue-raising. After all, companies cannot vote. But now some British groups are voting with their feet, deciding to relocate headquarters to lower-tax regimes. The Treasury’s review of corporate tax is therefore a welcome move. Shire, a pharmaceuticals group, decided recently to relocate its headquarters to Ireland for tax reasons, while the publisher, United Business Media, announced this week its decision to do likewise. Some other large UK corporates are looking at whether it would be tax efficient for them to follow suit.

What did 2007 bring in terms of fiscal reforms in Europe?
IREF asked eleven experts from the four corners of Europe to report on the main trends in their countries and neighbouring countries. This gave us the 15 reports presented in our new yearbook on taxation. We already knew what the general situation and trends are in the EU. Namely, that the EU-27 is still the region of the world with the highest fiscal burden, that situations differ greatly among EU member states (with new member countries having lower fiscal burden) and that some trends can be found in the evolution of the tax-mix with, for instance, a weak tendency to replace corporate income tax and labour tax with consumption tax. The reports presented here give life to those statistics. They reveal what were the priorities and constraints of the government in each country. They point out to the structural weaknesses of each country fiscal system and give a critical presentation of the novelty recently introduced.