Rubik Agreements and Legal Communication
A controversial issue like bank secrecy and tax havens is at the center of one of the first experiments of video documenting in an academic conference on tax law.
A video review is available on Bocconi University's YouTube channel, which reproduces fully the eight-hour international seminar "Banking Secrecy, Tax Evasion and the 'Rubik Agreements' - A New International Tax Order?", organized by Giuseppe Marino, director of the Master in Corporate Tax Law.
Senior academics in tax law from many European countries joined the round table and confronted the issue of Rubik Agreements which Switzerland signed with Germany and UK in 2011 and which, if they were endorsed by the European Union, would become effective in 2013.
Rubik Agreements would let Swiss banks guarantee their German or British clients' anonymity on the condition that they levied a tax on the future interest income of the savers' investments which has to be equal to the rate that they would pay in their country of residence. They are also considering the possibility of introducing a tax on capital investment incomes gained in the past.
In this way, says who supports the Rubik Agreements, the interests of all the contracting parties would be conciliated: the Treasury of the country of residence would receive important tax revenues, partially paid in advance by Swiss banks (the first estimates say that Italy would receive 9 billion Euros); the savers, to whom anonymity would be guaranteed; Swiss banks, that would remain vital in the international markets.
The issue is so controversial that, as Andreas Perdelwitz (IBFD, Amsterdam) has written in his paper, "some consider the Agreement a milestone; others see it as a modern way of selling indulgences."
What is certain is that Rubik Agreements destabilize the European fiscal order and, in particular, that they pose some problems of incompatibility with EU law, because they bypass the Euro-tax, the OECD rules to avoid double taxation and, above all, the OECD Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs).
In a less ideological and more realistic perspective, Marino states himself to be "firmly convinced that introducing a tax with an equal effect of information exchange is a pragmatic solution, consistent with current economic globalization."
To watch the video documentation, CLICK HERE