Center for Freedom and Prosperity
For Immediate Release
Monday, September 22, 2010
202-285-0244
www.freedomandprosperity.org
CF&P Representative Will Defend Tax Competition, Financial Privacy and Fiscal Sovereignty at Upcoming OECD Global Forum in Singapore
(Washington, D.C., Wednesday, September 22, 2010) In order to defend tax competition, financial privacy and fiscal sovereignty, Dan Mitchell, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and Chairman of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, will be in Singapore for the upcoming Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes. The Forum is being held on September 29-30, and Mitchell will be available to consult with conference participants and also brief the media and other observers.
The OECD’s Forum is part of a costly multi-year campaign against tax competition, designed to prop up the inefficient tax regimes of the European welfare states that dominate and control the Paris-based bureaucracy.
CF&P will seek to educate participants and observers by explaining how tax competition promotes global economic growth by rewarding nations with pro-growth tax policy, thus encouraging high-tax nations to make much-needed reforms. Politicians resent this liberalizing process, however, largely because it undermines their ability to impose economically-destructive tax rates.
“The OECD has bullied low-tax jurisdictions into weakening their human rights laws designed to protect financial privacy,” said CF&P President Andrew Quinlan. “Now the European welfare states of the OECD are pushing for even more counterproductive forms of fiscal protectionism,” he warned.
Dan Mitchell noted that, “the OECD launched a surprise attack at the last Global Forum in Mexico and tried to expand its mission to include the ability to impose rules against tax planning.” Mitchell added that, “this relentless effort to seize more power is no surprise since the OECD’s ideology compels it to pursue an agenda that inevitably leads to explicit tax harmonization.”
Since its inception, CF&P has attended every Global Forum as a counter-balance to the one-sided OECD agenda, including our initial success in derailing the OECD agenda in 2001 in Barbados. Previous meetings have also been held in Paris, London, Berlin, Melbourne, Ottawa and Mexico City.
For additional comments:
Andrew Quinlan can be reached at 202-285-0244, andy@freedomandprosperity.org
Dan Mitchell can be reached at 202-218-4615, dmitchell@cato.org
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