Early in my tax career, in my role as stenographer, porter and punkawallah to the great and the good, I was instructed to join one of the senior partners at a meeting with Roy E. Disney's right-hand man. The conversation was going well (I had a walk-on part taking notes and fluttering my eyelashes, or whatever pseudo secretaries were supposed…
The ultimate illegal alien
While Shuster, Siegel and Kane were, without doubt, the Olympians of Action Hero Comics, the creators of Superman and Batman - each the 24 year-old son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe - were never going to be the heirs of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Man of Steel, the latest Superman blockbuster that I ran faster…
Letter to America
Minister For (sic) Finance, Republic of Ireland June 1, 2013 Mr Seamus Noonan, Boston MA, USA Dear Seamus, Mother Ireland is being crucified once again and she is hurting, to be sure. I was walking past the General Post Office on O'Connell Street yesterday when old Stephen Megan accosted me: " What's all this about Apples, young Michael?" he growled,…
Never judge a book by its e-ink screen
Amazon is hardly ever out of the tax headlines these days. Following on from management's mauling by a British Parliamentary Committee late last year and the developing Transfer Pricing dispute with the IRS, last week all eyes were on Amazon's reaction to the Senate's passing of the heat-seeking, this one has your name on it A-M-A-Z-O-N, Marketplace…
What a clever big country!
If you worked in the financial sector in the 1980s, odds-on you were classified as either a YUPPIE (Young Upwardly-Mobile Professional), a DINKY (Dual Income No Kids Yet) or a LOMBARD (Lots Of Money But A Right Richard Nixon). As I fell short on at least one letter of each of those acronyms I escaped…
Men in Sepia
When larger than life Oscar winner Orson Welles was asked why there had been a self-destructive theme running through his career, he replied that he was like the scorpion who begged the frog to carry him across the river on his back. When the frog hesitated, fearing that the scorpion would bite him, the scorpion…
They shoot horses, don’t they?
"It's under starter's orders - and they're off!" 2013 has scarcely made it out of the stalls and two stories are already vying for a place in the Winner's Enclosure at the annual Let's-Knacker-The-Taxpayer Steeplechase. First to gallop off the page and nearly knock out my eye was the disclosure by the Wall Street Journal that the Indian…
And so this is Christmas
In London for a client meeting last week, I decided to take in the Oxford Street Christmas Lights on my way to the airport. While, back in the smog-filled Decembers of my childhood, the lights adorning the length of Britain's premier shopping street carried fairy tale themes of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, this…
A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum
As a kid, did you ever dream of an extra tap in the kitchen that dispensed endless lashings of Coca Cola and Strawberry Milkshake? Or what about being let loose for an afternoon inside a locked, and deserted, sweet shop? Well, the not-so-juvenile tax practitioners of Bungabungaland woke up on November 21 to a dream come true. A…
Mas or Messi?
Barcelona. There was a time, not so long ago, when the capital of Catalonia was not yet known for Freddy Mercury's super-hit of the same name, when the 1992 Summer Olympics had not yet produced gold, when Carlos Ruiz Zafon had not yet got round to romanticizing La Rambla and the mysterious Cemetery of Forgotten Books, when Gaudi's…
Tax Break 