The International Tax Review is a London-based multimedia publication that is a major source of information and debate for those whose profession and/or obsession is the mostly arcane world of international tax.
Among its most readable articles each year is its Christmas list of the 50 biggest movers and shakers in the tax world, the latest of which lists has just been published.
An unexpected name on the list is the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Washington DC-based organisation behind the Luxleaks revelations, which were based on leaked PricewaterhouseCoopers documents and which appeared in November just as the former prime minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker, was taking up his new position as president of the EU Commission.
This publication, along with other media outlets including the Guardian, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Politiken, operated as partners with the ICIJ in the project, which Juncker has acknowledged focused attention on tax practices that developed during his lengthy reign, which were entirely legal but produced "feeble" amounts of tax and were hard to justify on ethical grounds.
Also on the list is Marius Kohl, the former Luxembourg tax official who was the signatory of many of the advanced tax agreements that featured in the leaked PwC documents. He came 18th, in the so-called silver tier, a category he shares with Apple, the IMF, Wolfgang Schäuble and our own Michael Noonan (22nd place).
Bono of U2, the Irish band with Dutch tax residency, is in the bronze tier, in 31st place, squeezed between Bitcoin and Warren Buffett.
Among those in the gold tier is Rished Bade (9th), the boss of the revenue authority in Tanzania. He has set himself a target of increasing the tax take in the East African country to 19.9 per cent of GDP by 2018. Also in the top tier are George Osbourne (6th), the London-based enthusiast for the so-called Google tax, and Pascal Saint-Amans (2nd), the suddenly ubiquitous director of the tax policy unit at the OECD. But the top award goes to Monsieur Juncker who, having seen the error of his ways, is now leading the charge in the race for a fairer, or less dysfunctional, global tax regime.
