Arbeitspapier
Tax Robbery Incorporated: The transnational legal infrastructures of tax arbitrage
In the media, the so-called cum/ex trades were addressed as the biggest tax robbery in history. In a few years, the financial trading scheme caused an estimated damage to European state treasuries of ca. 50 billion euros. Through highly complex transactions, a network of equity traders, banks, super-rich investors, and lawyers generated returns of capital income tax that had never been paid before. In 2019, two involved British traders were put on trial in Bonn, Germany. Due to their cooperative behaviour, they received only mild sentences. Yet, this first cum/ex lawsuit has been a critical starting point for a wave of trials to follow. Observing the trial, the paper focuses on the role of law in the cum/ex industry. First, law is addressed not as constraining but enabling tax-driven equity - as an infrastructure that makes dark finance possible. Second, this legal infrastructure is not fixed but depends on an ongoing legal practice. And third, the infrastructure used for dark finance is not limited to domestic law. Rather, the relevant trading structures involve a series of transnational transactions, which are subject to various regulatory regimes, domestic and international, as well as public and private.
- Language
-
Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
-
Series: Global Cooperation Research Papers ; No. 30
- Classification
-
Politik
- Subject
-
Cum/ex
global tax governance
legal infrastructure
transnational law
white-collar crime
finance
court ethnography
practice
expertise
law and society studies
- Event
-
Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Liste, Philip
- Event
-
Veröffentlichung
- (who)
-
University of Duisburg-Essen, Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21)
- (where)
-
Duisburg
- (when)
-
2022
- DOI
-
doi:10.14282/2198-0411-GCRP-30
- Handle
- URN
-
urn:nbn:de:hbz:465-20220427-112952-5
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Arbeitspapier
Associated
- Liste, Philip
- University of Duisburg-Essen, Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21)
Time of origin
- 2022
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