*** NICHOLAS SHAXSON: Les paradis fiscaux. Enquête sur les ravages de la finance néolibérale. Publisher André Versaille (Centre Dansaert, 7 rue d'Alost, B-1000 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 2133705 - email: information@andreversailleediteur.com - Internet: http://www.andreversailleediteur.com ). 2012, 447 pp, €19.90. ISBN 978-2-87495-180-0.
First published by Bodley Head (Random House, London, UK) under the title Treasure Islands. Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, this book has now been expanded and translated into French. It reads like a good police thriller - or crime novel - that is so riveting that one can't put it down. The skill of the journalist is clearly at play here, but more importantly, Nicholas Shaxson manages to intermesh style and content to make an implacable case. The author is quick to explain that for several years now, millions of people around the world have had the feeling that there is something rotten in the global economy without being able to identify the problem. This book will reveal to you the roots of the evil. He is as good as his word. The author is a financial journalist who regularly contributes to the Financial Times and The Economist (which could lead one unlikely to suspect him of harbouring any aversion on principle to the idea of tax havens), and in this book, he invites readers to take an edifying, and frankly terrifying, plunge into the unsavoury and quite scandalous depths of big international finance, focussing on tax havens that 'undermine laws and institutions that promote the public good, undermining public confidence in democracy and totally corrupting international business.' Here too, he is as good as his word. It really is a mafia-run system full of people 'above all suspicion' whose success is envied, even. A business world that's 'lost its head' and which he systematically denounces with plenty of evidence. Aware that this mafia-infested system created the environment that made possible the financial crisis that we have been putting up with for fifty or so months now, this book is a new 'J'accuse' and deserves as much attention as Zola's masterpiece!
In the first chapter, entitled 'Welcome to Nowhere,' Nicholas Shaxson paints an edifying backdrop, explaining that between them, the forty-eight biggest companies in Europe have no fewer than 4,700 subsidiaries in tax havens, nearly a hundred each! According to a 2007 report by the British Court of Auditors, a third of the UK's biggest companies paid 'no tax' in the previous tax year - a year when the economy was booming. This suggests a complex system allows the rich to avoid paying tax by making use of secret bank accounts in some five dozen secretive jurisdictions that the author divides into four groups. The first comprises European tax havens, namely (unsurprisingly) Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Andorra and the Portuguese island of Madeira, along, more surprisingly, with countries like the Netherlands, Austria and Belgium. The second, biggest, group comprises nearly half of the world's secretive jurisdictions in three concentric circles around the City of London. The first circles are made up of the three Crown Dependencies (Jersey, Guernesey and the Isle of Man, where dodgy dealings are done by the City of London in line with the saying 'Jersey or jail,' with the worst of them being done in Gibraltar), followed by the British Overseeas Territories (the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos and Gibraltar) which, largely controlled by the UK, 'combine ultra-sophisticated financial services with a virtually medieval political system.' The final group of offshore satellites is a more heterogeneous group of tax havens, including Hong Kong, Singapore, the Bahamas, Dubai, Vanuatu, Ghana and, of course, … Ireland) which all have very close connections with the UK and the City of London, going back in history. Later, the author explains that the UK has not given up this incredible spider's nest, but has simply sent it further afield. A winning streak, because the three circles together account for more than a third of all global bank assets, rising to nearly a half if you include the City of London… The third and fourth groups listed by the author are ones dominated by the United States, whose virtue has long lost place to filthy lucre, which has reached such an extent that 'offshore finance was used for years by the Neo-Conservatives to ensure the United States dominated the planet.
Despite all the promises and rhetoric about dealing with tax havens, countries like the United Kingdom and the United States are still the 'main protectors of offshore finance,' says the author, sneering at the OECD's 'black list' of tax havens, which he describes as 'more of a machine for laundering dodgy reputations than a black list as such. These are all different aspects of an entire system designed to prevent the rich from paying tax - including Bettencourt and Murdoch-style tax measures whereby companies and owners of mobile capital pay less and less tax, with the tax burden being shifted onto the shoulders of ordinary people. In the following thirteen chapters, these disgusting measures are revealed. A particularly edifying and almost unbelievable chapter is devoted to the City of London Corporation, 'the oldest municipal administration in the world, and a prehistoric monitor that somehow managed to survive until modern times,' 'a very secretive state within a state,' which no politician would dare to confront. This helps us understand why today's politicians are increasingly resistant to measures to clean up the world of finance being prepared in Brussels and why, in the recommendations Nicholas Shaxson sets out for dealing with this hydra, he calls in the first place for the 'British spider's web' to be dealt with, the 'biggest and most aggressive offshore system in the world.'
Michel Theys
*** Investing in Change. The Reform of Europe's Financial Markets. Association for Financial Markets in Europe (St. Michael's House, 1 George Yard London, EC3V 9DH, UK. Tel: (44-20) 77439300 -Fax: 77439301 - Internet: http://www.afme.eu ). 2012, 142 pp, £10. ISBN 978-1-78125-013-6.
This book has been published by a body representing the leading European and global banks active in the wholesale markets. In it, independent experts like the Deputy Governor Financial Stability at the Bank of England , former Labour minister Shriti Vadera, businessmen and consultants, investors and figures from academia examine the major update of regulations sparked by the financial crisis in order to deal with shortcomings and failings in the system and other changes that are needed. According to Gaël de Boissard, head of the Financial Markets Association in Europe, by means of this book, the AFME has shown it 'is committed to making significant changes in the way it does business.'
(PBo)
*** MATTHÄUS MARKUS SIELECKI: Creating and Governing an Integrated Market for Retail Banking Services in Europe. A Conceptual-Empirical Study of the Role of Regulation in Promoting a Single Euro Payments Area. Peter Lang (1 Moostrasse, Postfach 350, CH-2542 Pieterlen. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). "Corporate Finance and Governance" series, No. 5. 2011, 301 pp, €55-90. ISBN 978-3-631-60834-0.
The author, Matthäus Markus Sielecki, is a banker who has found the time and courage to write this thesis for the European Business School of Oestrich-Winkel in Germany. He looks at how the regulations introduced by European politicians have led to the creation of a single financial market in Europe, along with a single banking market. He looks at the impact of the cross-border payment directive and the planned Single European Payment Area to examine the subject of his research, showing that institutions are important, but so too EU rules, no matter how appropriate, are not always introduced properly in the Member States. Various national barriers are still in place, for example, for retail banking, bearing witness to the good governance issue and leading Prof. Joachim Ahrens to write in the preface that 'the European Union's legislative bodies should focus their basic regulatory powers on achieving harmonisation in these domains first and foremost, even if there is strong resistance from the Member States.' In this spirit and taking account of the current financial turmoil, it would seem that a centralised control agency is needed, which is clearly not going to be plain sailing in these times when national sovereignty is putting up stiff resistance.
(PBo)
*** MAURICE BOMMENSATH: Le Monde Nouveau de Chimerica. Le rôle clef des entreprises. Éditions Publisud (15 rue des Cinq-Diamants, F-75013 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 45807850 - Fax: 45899415 - email: publisud.editions@cegetel.net - Internet: http://www.editionspublisud.hautetfort.com ). 2012, 254 pp, €44. ISBN 978-2-36291-030-2.
Consultant in specialised professional training operations Maurice Bommensath provides readers in this book with lessons from his observation of the current financial and economic crisis and how countries and companies can survive it. He stresses the growing importance of China and India in the world, which will force Westerner to change their culture. Other changes will be wrought on all and sundry by the depletion of the planet's natural resources. Against this backdrop, the author says that multinationals will play a key role in creating a new world. The author believes that Europe 'will soon find itself faced with a drastic choice, going much further than temporary sticking plasters, namely either taking up federalism and revolutionising its public management, or falling apart.' As far as the author is concerned, if the United States are coming out of the global crisis better than Europe, it is because it has coherent and efficient decision-making centres, whereas the EU - and more particularly the eurozone - has thus far refused to provide itself with a truly federal structure, which is the only way of rapidly deciding on effective measures …
(MT)
*** KHAIREDDINE JEBSI, JALELEDDINE BEN REJEB, TAHER HAMZA, SAMIR ABDELHAFIDH (Eds.): Finance et stratégies de développement. Actes du cinquième colloque international de l'Institut Supérieur de Gestion de Sousse, Tunisia. Éditions Publisud (see above). 2012, 249 pp, €38-94. ISBN 978-2-36291-029-6.
Following on from an important scientific conference in Sousse a little over two years ago, this book (which given its highly scientific nature is aimed solely at experts in economics and finance) includes fourteen essays on subjects like risk countries, economic growth and investment, foreign trade, IT and communications externalities, accounting and financial problems, assessing financial assets and research into foreign and domestic governance and the performance of companies and financial institutions. As Hakim Ben Hammouda, special advisor to the African Development Bank, explains, these are all issues with consequences for the behaviour of companies, financial market investors and micro- and macroeconomic players.
(MT)
*** JAN M. HEBLY (Ed.): European Public Procurement. Legislative History of the 'Remedies' Directives 89/665/EEC and 92/13/EEC. Wolters Kluwer Law International (P. O. Box 316, 2400 AH Alphen aan den Rijn, The Netherlands. email: sales@kluwerlaw.com - Internet: http://www.kluwerlaw.com ). 2011, 930 pp. ISBN 978-90-411-2835-5.
The author has already written a book on the legislative history of EU Directive 2004/17/EC on coordination of public procurement procedures for water, energy, transport and postal services. Prof. Jan M. Hebly of Leiden University has now written an equally impressive tome along with legal experts Wynand J. Brants and Marijke Z. Kos, in which he makes a genuine exploration of facts and legislative documents leading up to the drafting of the 'remedial' directives to improve the efficiency of public tender appeals procedures. This is a reference work that will be of particular interest as a working tool for specialist lawyers. It then reviews the written foundations of the directives' preambles, articles and annexes, giving a chronological overview of legislative documents connected with each of the directives, along with a key-word index.
(PBo)
*** Report on Competition Policy 2010. Including a European Commission department's working paper. The European Union (Official Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. Internet: http://www.bookshop.europa.eu ). Competition Reports series. 2011, 228 pp, €25. ISBN 978-92-79-20185-1.
On the fortieth anniversary of this series of competition reports, the 2010 report starts off by listing the main changes in competition policy and its application over the past four decades. It then examines changes in 2010. The report is also available in English, German and all other official EU languages upon application to the Publications Office bookshop website.
(MT)