The changing face of today's corporate cheats, and why we pay tax There were at least three broad-based shocks in the release of the Paradise Papers last November: the gargantuan financial sums involved; the household names (corporations and individuals) attached; and that the revelations were minimised by some tax experts and international authorities whose job should be to stamp out tax avoidance
Richard Ogier on the astonishing scenario of moral laxity and personal enrichment playing out currently in the Old World kingly court of French electoral politics.
Has Merkel given up on her refugee policy? <br /><br /> The naysayers are calling it a climbdown, but is it? German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stepped back abruptly from her open-arms policy on refugees - or has seemed to. The slogan 'We Can Do It' (Wir schaffen das) - memorably hailed as heroic by an Auschwitz survivor in the German parliament earlier this year - has become 'almost an empty formula' given the daunting…
One of the remarkable ironies of the current refugee crisis in Europe is that the One World idealists of yesterday have become the bearers of a certain realpolitik today. As critics of German Chancellor Angela Merkel would have it, 'those people there' - refugees fleeing Year Zero destruction in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq - are now, well, over here, with us in Europe and the West.