Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We have had the Paradise Papers, Panama Papers and the Luxembourg Leaks. We have to call these leaked documents by their proper name: they amount to an international white-collar criminal conspiracy on an industrial scale.

Let us consider the so-called legal end of the conspiracy: tax avoidance. Oxfam estimates that $100 billion per year is lost in much-needed state revenue. This particularly affects poorer countries, which are more reliant on corporation tax than income taxes. On average, corporation taxes accounts for 16% of income in developing countries. That is double the 8% average in the developed world. This is lost tax income that could be spent on basic health services and education. Oxfam estimates that one third of the $100 billion could prevent 8 million unnecessary deaths every year. How can any government stand over the fact that 8 million deaths, that are unnecessary, can occur every year because of this conspiracy?

That is only one side of the conspiracy. Another is made up of tax havens and the lawyers, solicitors, accountants, tax consultants and the various parasites who feed off them. They are essential to tax evasion and money laundering. They are essential to organised crime, the drug trade, people smuggling, the illegal arms trade and the corrupt cliques who are asset stripping their own countries.

Without the legal tax havens and the industry that surrounds them, it would be much more difficult to launder this money and wash it clean of the human misery from which it is earned.

This week, I read an opinion piece in The Irish Times by a certain Mr. Cronin, the vice chairman of Deloitte Ireland, a company which knows a thing or two about the tax avoidance business. Mr. Cronin argues that we should not overreact to the Paradise Papers and that a little tinkering might be required to assuage public opinion and maintain a beneficial environment for businesses and investment. I do not know how it is possible not to react with outrage to what the Paradise Papers have revealed. The super rich, the wealthiest and the biggest companies in the world, along with organised crime and corrupt dictatorships, are stealing from the poorest and most vulnerable, denying them basic health care and education and denying 8 million people, including children, the right to live. According to Mr. Cronin, we should not overreact and he casually suggests that a greater focus should be placed on consumption and property taxes. Talk about the unacceptable face of capitalism. This is a case of leaving the rich alone, move along because there is nothing to see here and tax the poor because it is easier. In sub-Saharan Africa, 66% of tax income comes from VAT, a consumption tax that hits the poorest hardest. When Mr. Cronin speaks of property, he does not mean major assets held in the form of property or zoned land hoarding, but a local property tax on ordinary homes. How these people sleep at night is beyond me.

Action will have to be taken by the OECD and European Union. The record of the OECD in this area is not good. It produced a blacklist of tax havens for the G20, which managed to identify only one tax haven, Trinidad and Tobago, a country that apparently did not have sufficient clout to have itself excluded from the list. The OECD's effort was more of a whitewash than a blacklist. The European Union did better, producing a report this week which listed 35 tax havens. However, the EU list also has a problem in that it only examined non-EU countries. By this sleight of hand, it did not include the four tax havens in the European Union, namely, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands and Ireland. The EU criteria were transparency, fair taxation and co-operation internationally on tax issues. Many of the countries on its list have zero rates of corporation tax. While this is not the case with the four EU countries in question, when special deals and deliberate loopholes mean companies such as Apple pay an effective corporate tax rate of less than 1%, it equals tax haven status. There is no other way around it. When royalties constitute 26% of a country's gross domestic product in one year and exceed the combined royalties of all other EU member states, there is something dodgy going on. Incidentally, living in a tax haven is of little benefit to those who do not count among the elite, for example, 32% of the population of Panama live below the poverty line.

On the not unimportant issue of jobs and investment, the World Economic Forum's global competitiveness report indicates that of 12 considerations for investment, the most important are infrastructure, a healthy and educated workforce and social stability. These areas all require significant State investment funded by taxation, including relatively high and progressive levels of corporation tax. The record of Scandinavian countries on inward investment is proof that the race to the bottom on corporation taxes is self-defeating.

Measures can be taken to tackle this international conspiracy. Ireland should press to require transnational companies to produce country by country reports. These companies should be forced to give a breakdown of their turnover in each country in which they operate and provide details on employee numbers, assets, sales, profits and taxes paid or unpaid. This is the most effective measure we could take and much more effective than BEPS. We must be realistic.

Until we move beyond a system based on the maximisation of profits as opposed to the common good, a system based on gross inequality and exploitation, these injustices will persist. It should be part of this country's remit to go in to the EU and argue for this, and have a transparent company register with everything on it, including where they pay their taxes and unpaid taxes. If we do not do so, the poverty and inequality that we have seen developing over the past ten or 15 years will continue, and it will be on the Government's head. The Government will be seen in history as part of that triangle of greed.

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