White House announces crackdown on tax avoidance dealsSeptember 23, 2014 - 08:27 AMT PanARMENIAN.Net - The White House has announced a crackdown on tax avoidance deals known as inversions, BBC News reports. The practice involves a U.S. firm merging with a firm in a country with a lower tax rate and has become popular over recent years. But President Barack Obama said new treasury department measures would make inversions less attractive.Those include making it more difficult for an inverted company to access money made outside the U.S. One way inverted companies do that is by making loans between foreign units and the U.S. business.The benefits of so called hopscotch loans will be removed, according to the announcement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The treasury department is also strengthening the requirement that the U.S. owners of the new inverted firm have to earn less than 80% of the new entity. It says that will mean some inversion deals "no longer make economic sense". "We've recently seen a few large corporations announce plans to exploit this loophole, undercutting businesses that act responsibly and leaving the middle class to pay the bill, and I'm glad that [Treasury Secretary Jack Lew] is exploring additional actions to help reverse this trend," the president said in a statement. In a recent inversion deal, Burger King bought Canadian coffee and doughnut chain, Tim Hortons. Under the deal the new group moved its headquarters to Ontario, Canada, where the corporate tax rate is 26.5% - much less than the U.S. rate of 35%. Top stories Yerevan has dismissed Turkey’s demand to shut down the Armenian nuclear power plant as “inappropriate”. Armenia will loan 2.9 billion drams to Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh), according to a draft government decision. The Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Azerbaijan has “strongly condemned” Armenia’s decision. Kerobyan has said that for the first time in the history of Armenia, the volume of foreign direct investments amounted to about $1 billion. Partner news | Scholz hopes Armenia-Azerbaijan peace treaty will be signed this year German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hopes that a peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan will be signed this year. Ucom equips four bus stops in Ijevan with free Wi-Fi Ucom now provides free Wi-Fi coverage in smart bus stops in four communities of Ijevan. Armenians stage more campaigns against territorial concessions to Azerbaijan Protesters blocked more roads across Armenia on Friday, April 26 in continuing attempts to scuttle territorial concessions to Azerbaijan. Czech-Armenian military cooperation discussed in Yerevan A delegation led by the Director General for the Industrial Cooperation Division of the Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic visited Armenia. |