The paradise papers alleged tax avoidance scandals have generated lots of interest since the stories began to break on Sunday.
Queen Elizabeth II of England and in Nigeria, the Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki; the CBN Governor, Mr Godwin Emefiele and chairman of Zenith Bank, Mr Jim Ovia, are among the high profile individuals across the world mentioned in these publications.
The Paradise Papers are a set of 13.4 million documents relating to offshore investment. The documents were made public by Süddeutsche Zeitung, which was also the newspaper which also made the Panama Papers public in 2016.
The papers include records from an offshore law firm, Appleby, although the company has released a statement stating there has been “no evidence of wrongdoing”.
It is not illegal, as many corporations and businesses have been known to engage the practice in order to reduce the tax burden.
One line of defence adopted by most of the people mentioned is that they did nothing wrong. They did not evade taxes
This leads to the questions, “What is tax avoidance? Is it a crime?
Here are some answers.
According to Wikipedia, “Tax avoidance is the legal usage of the tax regime in a single territory to one’s own advantage to reduce the amount of tax that is payable by means that are within the law. Tax havens are jurisdictions which facilitate reduced taxes.”
Tax evasion, on the other hand, is the general term for efforts by individuals, corporations, trusts and other entities to evade taxes by illegal means.
To buttress the point about the legality or otherwise of tax avoidance, the minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun also stressed that tax avoidance schemes are legal. She added, however, that it was only tax evasion that was illegal.
She said government would investigate the issues raised so far by the Paradise Papers report.
On the allegations against Emefiele, the lawyers of the companies allegedly linked to him in the past have spoken. They have clearly said the CBN governor did no wrong. He even resigned a long time ago from the controversial companies in question.
People mentioned in the list are: Queen Elizabeth II, Bono, former Prime Ministers of Canada: Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, and Brian Mulroney; U.S. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson; economic advisor, Gary Cohn; U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross; son-in-law of Vladimir Putin, Madonna, Paul Allen; President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Carlos Slim, Chancellor of Austria Alfred Gusenbauer, Prince Charles, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister of Japan Yukio Hatoyama, President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Shakira, Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan, Prime Minister of Pakistan Shaukat Aziz, and sons of Prime Minister of Turkey Binali Yıldırım.
Companies also mentioned were Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, EBay, Glencore, Uber, Nike, Walmart, Allianz, Siemens, McDonald’s and Yahoo.
