Christian Aid is seeking to persuade four ‘household name’ companies to back accounting reforms to ‘help poor countries collect more of the tax billions which are rightfully theirs’.
The charity’s ‘Trace the Tax’ campaign calls for ‘greater financial transparency by multinational companies’ including country-by-country reporting of profits made and taxes paid.
Vodafone Unilever TUI Travel (which owns Thomson) and the Intercontinental Hotels Group (which owns Holiday Inn) all have assets and subsidiaries in developing countries Christian Aid said.
‘It is really important to stress that we are not accusing these companies of tax dodging ’ said Helen Collinson the charity’s Campaigns Manager.
Very few tax experts have been prepared to challenge publicly Christian Aid’s estimate that ‘tax-dodging firms rob poor countries of more than $160bn a year’. The figure included the estimated impact of alleged ‘mispricing’ or false invoicing and ‘abusive transfer pricing’.
But...