This week, I have an overabundance of topics to rant about. First, there’s some bizarre stuff I read in ET, about how the Indian government wants to put tax sanctions on uncooperative tax havens. Pray, who is that going to bother in the least other than legitimate Indian companies working overseas, who have enough red tape to deal with?
Or equally legit professionals? The kind of people who stash their black cash don’t pay withholding tax or leave paper trails, doh. So go, make sure your Nifty or BSE toppers are uncompetitive in the cut-throat global marketplace. There isn’t a single major (or minor) Indian company, Indiafocused fund, or listed entity I know of operating in this market — and mostly NYSE or Nasdaq too — which isn’t HQ’d in either Jersey, Isle of Man, Mauritius or Monaco.
A huge chunk of the Indian diaspora working in say, the City of London — with what the MEA would call phoren banks, forsooth! This whole episode is so Falstaff — have legitimate accounts in these jurisdictions. It’s always been a matter of convenience and tax planning. Something all of us do, like buying that nth useless LIC policy. None of them can or do evade taxes in any of the jurisdictions they function in.
If any tax haven is telling us to go jump before they open their databases for a political stunt, it is so totally unlikely to be remotely bothered about any sanctions. The whole nonsense is beginning to sound a bit like the loony fringe group UK Uncut, who have been picketing companies like M&S and Vodafone claiming they don’t pay their share of taxes, simply because they have operations, or shareholders, based in tax havens.
UK Uncut is a random protest group. The Indian government is not. Being an NRI — a much misinterpreted tag. It’s not a state of being. Everyone who is located outside India for more than three months in a tax year becomes one, whether we like it or not — I happen to be forced to know more about withholding tax than I ever wanted to, and unless India wants to renegotiate every single DTAA agreement with ‘non-cooperative’ jurisdictions, this threat of how everyone will come crawling is yet another moronic puff statement.
The Swiss, for instance, have held on to their famed secrecy and neutrality through two world wars, taken on the US on precisely this — and lost to some extent in international legislation, but still. You think India’s threats are going to scare ’em more than Hitler did? Grow up, someone. And umm, terribly sorry to deflate everyone’s egos, India isn’t an OECD member, so we are not covered by the last general disclosure agreement, so we have to painfully negotiate bilateral treaties with every tax haven.
As a nation, Indian passport holding NRIs probably pay as much into various welfare and dole programmes around the developed world as we stash in Swiss banks. I’d like some numbers on those. And we, or our poor, never get even a penny back. Ouch.
I wanted to actually rave about David Cameron and his even more moronic speech on multiculturism last week, just hours after I wrote my last column. I just have a 100 words left to have complete hysterics. David Cameron, in Munich at a security conference, behaving like some kind of echo of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, said, ‘statesponsored multiculturism’ isn’t working in Britain, and how Muslims need to integrate more, and then went on about Islamist terrorism as opposed to Islam.
Unfortunately, on the same day as some right-wing extremists were doing demonstrations back home. It ticked off quite a lot of British Muslims, the left, the right, and everyone else I can think of. If I’d gone by the popular media’s reports, even I’d be ticked off, so I read his full speech to figure what he’s trying to say.
I’d say, as an editor, he’s seriously missing Andy Coulson, phone hacker or not. Mr Cameron’s speech reads entirely confused — what is he talking about? Religion , politics, society or national security ? What is he talking about when he goes on about ‘being British’?
Labour spent pots of money and months trying to figure it out, and finally came out with Press statements that it meant stuff like speaking English and walking the dog. The Brits don’t have a national identity as such — if you’re talking about whites, there are scots, and Irish, and welsh, essex girls, northerners, southerners, middle England, Europeans, all with completely different world views, pretty much like India.
If you’re talking about everyone with British passports, there are Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians, Caribbeans, Sri Lankans, Africans, the entire flotsam and jetsam of Britain’s colonial past and European membership. If you’re talking about religions, there are Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, Jains, Zoroastrians, Agnostics, Jews, Atheists. Oh, and by British laws, Pagans, Witches, Druids, possibly Celts, Vikings, even Atlanteans — all of whom are entitled to practice their religion and take Kate and Will’s wedding day off.
They routinely go to court and win about these rights. What worries me about this multiculturism being equated with Islamic terrorism is that it will set off the right-wing backlash that is bubbling under the surface, and then we all get hit. I dunno, but Britain’s current legally-enforced tolerant society — which is what I assume he means by state-sponsored — has evolved from an often gruesome past history of racism and discrimination , including those dotbusters and skinheads of the 1960s and 1970s.
It’s worrying, at a time when Obama is trying to build bridges with the Islamic world, that a variety of world leaders, from Singapore to France are openly bashing Muslims. Of course, it’s all terribly complicated. But I’d rather they didn’t drag the rest of us into it by calling it a failure of multiculturalism.
