Tax Break has just had its longest break since its inception in 2011 due to the difficult period Israel has been going through. The post below is more sober than usual (in fact, for some people, it might be downright depressing). Please do not adjust your computers - normal service will be resumed as soon…
Taking the mojo out of inversions
By now, everybody has heard of the aborted takeover of British pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca by US giant, Pfizer. The latest in a series of US corporate inversions, the new corporate structure was to be headed by the smaller UK company, thus largely spiriting the merged group beyond the lascivious tentacles of the US Internal Revenue Service. Fascinated by…
Foul!
"I fail to understand why any of you would be interested in twenty-two illiterate young men kicking an inflated pig's bladder around an oblong of grass." A bible-bashing preacher doing the rounds of Lancashire's pubs in late-Victorian England? Not quite. Actually, the headmaster of my school (see previous post) in mid- 1973 berating a hodgepodge of gormless…
Down Wiv Skool
I was chatting the other night with my middle son when he came out with the word "procrastinate". He also knew what it meant - not bad for a young man neither born nor bred in an English-speaking country. While 'procrastinate' is not as complicated as 'antidisestablishmentarianism,' the word does have as many syllables as that old spelling bee…
Deading The Fat Man
Moral Dilemma - two words that do not feature prominently , jointly or severally, in the tax advisor's lexicon. In the first half of the 20th Century when world wars were all the rage, moral dilemmas evolved from the gritty reality of combat. By the late sixties serious debate was banished to the periphery of existence…
Go ahead punk, make my day
"This tape will self-destruct in five seconds." In the 1960s, while the mission may have been impossible, information protection was very possible. Burned, swallowed or - until a bunch of bored students were looking for something to do at the US Embassy in Teheran - shredded, there was no difficulty eradicating the evidence from the face of the earth.…
Tracking tax avoidance
" U.S. Lawmakers Slam Caterpillar Over Tax Avoidance". That headline last month in one of our drab but professional trade mags brought a sardonic smile to my face as I imagined a black-windowed Hummer careering around Capitol Hill jam-packed with Senators. At the vehicle's wheel was Carl Levin who suddenly screamed "Ya-hoo" ,or whatever 80-year-old Americans from Michigan scream when…
Whole in one
"I said: 'Remember Lot’s wife. Never look back.' I don’t know whether Henry had read the Old Testament or not, but I had, and he got the point." Thus spake that most Nietzschean of US Presidents, Richard Milhous Nixon, to Sir David Frost back in 1977, mocking his former Secretary of State's qualms about invading…
In Memoriam
Venturing downstairs at the crack of dawn every weekday morning, my first conscious daily act is to open the front door and hunt for the newspaper. Invariably within a five yard radius of the letter-box, it is pot luck if it is in pristine condition on the path, lying face-down in a puddle in the…
A Tale of Two Cities
Arriving at a hotel in the heart of Dickens country late last Monday night, I was asked by the receptionist if my day had been a pleasant one. I replied that, having woken in one country, worked a full day in another and being now about to go to sleep in yet another, I did not…
Tax Break 