Why no apology from Jersey’s politicians?
Following our recent blog on Jersey lobbying, now the Tax Research blog reports:
As the Jersey Evening Post has recorded:
"JERSEY faces a review by the EU Code of Conduct Group on Business Taxation in September over the discredited ‘zero-ten’ corporate tax system. The review had not formally been announced in Jersey, but the news slipped out because Guernsey is celebrating avoiding the assessment by committing early to a 10% corporate tax rate across the board."
I did, of course, break this story first on this blog. And as a Jersey correspondent has said to me tonight:
"Extraordinary isn’t it. They said all that time ago…..Of course we’re EU compliant…..of course we are…..we’ve got it in black and white…. And they wonder why we don’t trust them and don’t know what to believe any more?"
Quite so. (TJN's) John Christensen, Prem Sikka, Austin Mitchell and I have been vilified in turn over the years in Jersey for pointing out obvious truths.
And over those years the politicians of Jersey have said time and again Jersey’s tax system was EU compliant – and it was all agreed in writing. It never has been. We were right all along.
Not a hint of apology has been offered by those politicians to the people of Jersey for their having misled them for so long. . . . the people of Jersey should be very angry indeed.
As the Jersey Evening Post has recorded:
"JERSEY faces a review by the EU Code of Conduct Group on Business Taxation in September over the discredited ‘zero-ten’ corporate tax system. The review had not formally been announced in Jersey, but the news slipped out because Guernsey is celebrating avoiding the assessment by committing early to a 10% corporate tax rate across the board."
I did, of course, break this story first on this blog. And as a Jersey correspondent has said to me tonight:
"Extraordinary isn’t it. They said all that time ago…..Of course we’re EU compliant…..of course we are…..we’ve got it in black and white…. And they wonder why we don’t trust them and don’t know what to believe any more?"
Quite so. (TJN's) John Christensen, Prem Sikka, Austin Mitchell and I have been vilified in turn over the years in Jersey for pointing out obvious truths.
And over those years the politicians of Jersey have said time and again Jersey’s tax system was EU compliant – and it was all agreed in writing. It never has been. We were right all along.
Not a hint of apology has been offered by those politicians to the people of Jersey for their having misled them for so long. . . . the people of Jersey should be very angry indeed.
posted by TJN at 10:29 pm
2 Comments:
And its not just politicians: senior civil servants and government advisers have joined in the abuse-fest, often in a very personal way, imputing motives and sneering at anyone who avoids the now discredited economic orthodoxies.
Still, looking on the bright side, Jersey's Senator Terry le Main, a long-standing stooge of the present and past chief ministers -- and a man who has been outrageously abusive to TJN members in Jersey -- has finally been forced to resign over his corrupt activities. I say finally because I was well aware of his monkey business way back in the late-1980s.
And there's plenty more shovelling needed on the island before the stables are anywhere near clean.
John
This, of course, coincides with the first announcements of where the spending cuts are going to happen, to fill in the structural deficit at the heart of Jersey's economy.
Needless to say, the poor suffer first.
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