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dwellordream · 3 years

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“…War often necessitated the absence of men from their families and their homes. While we have already touched on the fact that women could exercise military leadership during such an absence, the importance of their domestic role in the context of the husbands’ or sons’ military activities is worth considering, even if the women themselves were not all directly involved in military activity. For, in their men-folk’s absence, women sometimes assumed full control over the governance of the household or estate, along with all the lands which came with it – a role which took on an added significance amongst marriages of the more powerful nobles of Western Europe whose landholdings often entailed extensive seigniorial rights.

Stephen of Blois, for instance, alluded to the power that his wife Adela had whilst he was absent on the First Crusade when he wrote that ‘I send [the wish] that you do well and dispose of your things superbly, and treat your sons and your men honorably, as befits you’. This statement reveals the lordly authority which Adela maintained as regent while Stephen was absent and which she was to retain after his early death in May 1102 – right up until she took the veil as a nun in 1120. The military authority she wielded as lord is demonstrated by the fact that she once sent a large number of knights to support her lord Louis VI (c.1081-1137) while he was fighting rebellious castellans north of Paris in 1101.

But Adela was not the only women whose regency resulted from the call to crusade: when Louis IX went on crusade he entrusted the governance of the French kingdom to his mother, Blanche of Castile, who had proven herself a reliable and effective ruler during his minority. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204), queen of France and later England, similarly acted as regent in England for her son Richard I while he went on crusade, and was involved in mediating ecclesiastical disputes in his absence as well as in matters of governance. Likewise, Clementia of Burgundy, wife of Robert II of Flanders, held his county while he was left on the First Crusade, much like Eremburge of Maine governed the county of Anjou during her husband’s absence on crusade in 1120.

In the Holy Land the wife of Joscelin the Younger, count of Edessa (d. 1159), governed the county ably after he had been taken prisoner in 1150 – ‘far beyond the strength of a woman’, according to William of Tyre. His remark hints at the way in which medieval women who did govern well were thought by their male contemporaries to have transcended the ‘weakness’ of their sex, much like other comments regarding militant women referred to their masculine qualities in order to explain their involvement. Regardless of how well they governed, though, the key point is that it was war that forced these women to assume governing roles at home in support of their husbands or sons.

Women were also sometimes entrusted with the administration and coordination of affairs in preparation for war. Thus in 1267 the earl of Pembroke wrote to his wife, who had command over the castle of Winchester, informing her that he had sent men to help her defend the castle from attack and instructing her that she had ‘power over them all...to ordain and arrange in all things according to that which you shall see to be best to do’. More striking is a letter sent by Edward III in 1335 to three women: Margaret, widow of Edmund, earl of Kent; Marie, wife of Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke; and Joan, wife of one Thomas Botetourt.

In this letter Edward, who was absent fighting in Scotland, commanded these women to gather trusted advisors together in London to ‘treat and ordain on the safe custody and secure defence of our realm and people, and on resisting and driving out the foreigners’ who Edward had heard were massing warships and men at sea. The women were then ordered to ‘arm and array your people...to repel powerfully and courageously the presumptuous boldness and malice of our same enemies...if those enemies invade’. Although we do not know the extent to which these women were successful in carrying out the king’s orders, Edward nevertheless showed remarkable faith in the capacity of these women to prepare for the defence of the realm in his absence – certainly no small task.

Another particularly important arena in which women could directly aid the military effort was through their efforts to help finance and raise money for wars within Western Europe and the Holy Land. Funding for military campaigns was raised in many different ways – taxation, general donations, mortgaging or selling property – and women formed an important part of this process, especially when it came to paying for costly crusades to the East. We have already seen how Pope Innocent III, at the turn of the thirteenth century, began to make greater allowances for women to accompany their husbands on crusade or take a crusade vow if they were able to take armed followers with them to the Holy Land, but what really freed up this process was the promulgation of Innocent III’s decretal Quia maior in April 1213 (which pronounced the Fifth Crusade).

Quia maior stipulated regular liturgical processions of men and women, during which the participants would hear sermons, receive some degree of remission of sins just for listening (according to an earlier letter of Innocent), and pray for God to deliver the Holy Land. Furthermore, it promoted greater financial participation by making it possible for women to finance male warriors to go in their place and also specified monthly Church collections to which men and women could contribute. Perhaps most importantly, Quia maior decreed that anyone of either sex who so chose could take a crusade vow and might redeem or commute it if necessary (in return for a monetary payment), thus widening the number of people who might contribute financially to the crusade movement.

Later papal policy expanded this practise by enforcing the payment of vow redemptions if crucesignati (the legal term used to signify someone who had taken a vow) did not leave on crusade. As far as women are concerned there seems to be not enough evidence to gauge how much they actually contributed to the overall amount of money collected from redemptions, or even how much was collected in the first place. Nevertheless, Innocent’s reforms certainly allowed women to take on a greater financial and spiritual role in supporting the crusades, even if their circumstances prevented them from going on crusade in person.

Vow redemptions were, however, only one means by which women could provide monetary assistance. Often more financially taxing were instances in which women were forced to sell their husbands’ property or mortgage dower lands, which left some destitute and others fighting in the courts for their property rights, as Christopher Tyerman has explored in the case of English women. At other times, women helped contribute funds collectively, especially in the case of poorer crusaders who had to rely more on donations from the whole family, in which case the selling and mortgaging of property was again the most common way of financing a family member for war.

Similarly, women who had control over a significant source of income could play a key role in helping finance men on crusade: Hodgson, for instance, cites the examples of Marie of Champagne and Blanche of Castile, both of whom acted as regents and sent money to their sons while they were crusading in the Holy Land, but has also noted other women whose large dower was a key financial source for crusade expeditions. Another more indirect means by which women could assist the continuing military struggle in the Holy Land came from the revenues of female convents associated with the recently founded military orders, of which part went towards financing the latter’s activities in the East (although these payments were not large and varied from one house to another depending on each convent’s financial means).

Finally, we cannot discount the role female taxpayers may have had in helping pay for war, although again it is very difficult to discern how much women contributed in this regard, since the head of the household (the eldest male) was the one who paid taxes and who thus appeared in tax records. The only women to appear were those active in an independent trade of their own or who were widowed and lived in a house in which no male heirs were also residing, though such women only seem to have made up a small proportion of taxpayers.

Thus, even if most or all tax revenue before the sixteenth century went towards financing war, as has been argued in the case of England, the percentage of the revenue that came directly from female taxpayers would have been much less than that of male taxpayers (though both sexes were adversely affected by the effects of high taxation in times of war). Considering all of the means by which women could contribute financially, therefore, it is reasonable to assume that Western European women were a substantial source of finances for military campaigns, especially for the crusades, although the precise extent to which this assistance actually contributed towards the success of these campaigns is hard to quantify.

Women’s enthusiasm for war and their recruitment efforts formed another facet of their home front involvement. This is one area where women may not have always acted in support of their men, and instead actively tried to discourage their men from leaving, hence the actions of such women are worth exploring as they could have influenced the number of men who went to war. The chances of women successfully preventing men’s involvement in warfare appear highest in the case of the crusades because, although wives’ emotional responses to their husbands’ departure could not prevent the latter from leaving, canon law stipulated both husband and wife required each other’s consent before leaving to go on crusade.

Thus women were, for a period, legally able to veto their husbands’ decision to participate. To what extent women were successful at doing so is not entirely clear – some of those who preached the crusade appear to have felt women were among the ones preventing the crusades from being successful, although after Pope Innocent III issued his decretal Ex multa in 1201, which removed the requirement for men to obtain their wives consent before leaving, they would have had little cause for further concern. These developments suggest that some women, at least up until 1201, were successful in stopping men from leaving, but it is hard to say for certain.

Emotional distress at the departure of loved ones on crusade may have played a role though: Odo of Deuil noted that there were tears on the part of women when the Second Crusade departed, as did Ambroise before the Third Crusade. Some years earlier Fulcher of Chartres elaborated at greater length on the sorrow before the First Crusade: ‘Oh what grief there was! What sighs, what weeping, what lamentation among friends when husband left his wife so dear to him, his children, his possessions however great...Then husband told wife the time he expected to return...He commended her to the Lord, kissed her lingeringly, and promised her as she wept that he would return.’

Departure scenes such as this one, it has been argued, were deliberately used by chroniclers to portray the crusades as a male affair in which women were not expected to participate. Certainly, such an account does reinforce conventional gender stereotypes: the emotionally controlled, pious husband, and the overwhelmed, irrational wife unable to maintain her composure. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to assume that some women would have been reluctant for their men to depart and upset if the latter eventually did, although we cannot know the extent of their influence on limiting the numbers of men on crusade.

At the same time, medieval women also seem to have encouraged and even recruited men for war. Thus the author of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum asserted that ‘Brides urged their husbands and mothers incited their sons to go, their only sorrow being that they were not able to set out with them because of the weakness of their sex’. Although gender stereotyping is again evident in the way women’s ‘weakness of sex’ is said to have prevented them from leaving, there are some actual examples of women who tried to persuade men to fight. Adela of Blois, for instance, is well-known for her efforts to persuade her husband Stephen to return to the Holy Land after he deserted and came home during the difficult siege of Antioch in 1098.

Similarly, Alice de Montfort was active in recruiting men, notably her brother (the Constable of France) during the Albigensian crusade, as was, supposedly, Eleanor of Aquitaine before the Second Crusade. Riley-Smith, too, has also discussed women, notably the Montlhéry sisters in the Île-de-France, whom he feels ‘transmitted an enthusiasm for crusading to the families into which they married’ and which can help ‘account for the concentrations of crusaders in certain kindred’ during the early crusades. Of course, whilst the genealogical preponderance of crusaders in certain families does not prove for certain that women necessarily had anything to do with recruiting or persuading men to fight, the examples given above do suggest that we should not discount their possible influence.

Lastly, it is also worth considering the role which urban women active in certain trades had in supplying various resources used in military affairs. For although most women were active in the textile and cloth-making industries during the Middle Ages, there were apparently some who worked sharpening tools and making scabbards for swords and knives, and others who even trained in arms manufacture (making chain mail and fletching strings to bows) – definitely a trade that would have thrived on war. Admittedly, the numbers of women engaged in such crafts were very few and their likely effect on military affairs slight. Accordingly, we should not make too much of their employment or we risk over-emphasising their contribution. All the same, they do at least serve to draw attention to other more indirect means by which women on the ‘home front’ may have supported the whole industry of war by supplying military goods and services.

- James Michael Illston, ‘An Entirely Masculine Activity’? Women and War in the High and Late Middle Ages Reconsidered

#james michael illston #military #crusades #history #high middle ages #late middle ages #noblewomen #medieval

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seakclauswinkler · 2 years

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Artcollector (AC ) secrets by german artist SEAK Claus Winkler: - Some professions from my AC‘s which I know of: german Highschoolteachers, Wirtschafter ( Pimp ), Ceo‘s , Restaurant owners, LifeCoach, IT specialist, Tax chancellory / familyoffice owner, Board of Directors, It programer, florist shop owner, international known football player (soccer), australian mining ceo, worldchampigonship winning basketballcoach, progammer from Colombia owning 2 large estates in Miamibeach, californian estate owner, LA tattoo artist, entrepreneures , privatiers, münster telefonmarketeer, Business / company owners, ad agency owner, talent agency booker, city cultural departments, french artmuseum curator, international fashion business senior directors & owners, international music artist (Djaying), painting artists ( international ), SF based curator from london, pharmacists, austrian stakeholder/ entrepreneur, dentist, senior Bankmanager, german business advisor living switzerland, …… - AC‘s not pick up the art I painted for them, due they loving it, paid for it in advanced. Incl being overwhelmed by the results. I do really need the space. It’s almost 3 1/2 years now. Please. Though thanks for letting having it for such a long time, seeing it myself. - AC‘s first investing in already existing painting before aquiring a painting to be painted. - An AC showing up on there bday buying himself paintings. - AC‘s sending there Driver with the limousine catching up the art. - AC sending a spedition with a huge empty truck for large pieces. - AC renting a large Sprinter himself, flying to cologne, catching the painting himself, driving it home. #SEAKClausWinkler #artexpierences #artworldsecrets #galerieerfahrungen #galeriegeheimnisse #freieKünstler #künstlererfahrungen #artmarketingexpierence #Kunstsammlererfahrungen #artcollectorsecrets #artmarketingsecrets #kunstmarkterfahrungen #artistinfluence #artisteffect #kunstmarktgeheimnisse #artcollectorexpierence #artgallerysecrets #artbusinesssecrets #artworldsecrets #artbusinessexpierence #artgalleryexpierences #artmatters #artmarketexpierence #kunstmarkterfahrungen #artgallerydiary #modernartistexpierence (hier: Cologne, Germany) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ccupf-Qs_2-/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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ancientbrit · 4 years

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Natter #4 7/4/2020

MI MG Natter #4 4th July 2020I hope you all have had a happy fourth - all fingers still attached and tummies filled. Pickle seems to be getting used to the bangs this year, or perhaps he is a little deaf. Usually, at the first bang, he disappears and hides under my bed. This time he has wandered upstairs and downstairs and doesn't seem to register the bangs much at all - which is good.

I am in contact with a guy back home who runs a regular allotment (PeaPatch here) blog, giving timely advice and other information related mostly to veggie & fruit culture. I find this very helpful as he jogs my memory on those extremely rare occasions when I forget. I know you think that I never forget, but I have to admit that there has been the occasional lapse ever since I stopped eating peanuts. Strange thing that. His words for July remind us that this month is the time to sow seeds for Fall and Winter veggie crops such as Chicory (does anybody actually grow this?), Chinese Cabbage, Kohl Rabi, Lettuce, French Beans, Beetroot, Carrots, Radish, Turnips, and Peas - pick early varieties - early Snow peas are an especially fast to crop

.If you have had the forethought to already start Leeks from seed, now is the time to plant out those starts. The easiest way to do this is to use an old broomstick handle and thrust it vertically into the soil to a depth of about 5-6".Just drop the seedlings carefully, roots first into the holes and then just water in - that's all you need to do. The water will wash soil from the sides of the holes down onto the roots and it will remain cool and moist enough to thoroughly root the seedlings well. The idea of doing it this way, apart from the ease of planting and gaining support from the sides, is that the hole blanches the stem of the leek as it grows to gain more usable parts of the plant. If they are kept reasonably moist they should grow quite rapidly through the Summer and be ready to make fabulous potato-leek soup in time to keep cold days at bay. If you have never eaten P-L soup accompanied by chunks of Crusty artisan bread generously spread with butter - you haven't lived. Food of the Gods this! If you have been growing spuds and have lifted them already, you can follow with a crop of French beans to both nourish yourself and the soil, or if beans aren't your thing try a green manure crop such as Mustard. However, bear in mind that if you have ever had Club Root on your cabbage family plants, do not use Mustard as it is also a brassica. Use one of the Pea family, both for the Nitrogen root boost, but also for the foliage. And now for something completely different:- Once more my friend Valerie Robertson has presented her view on things English on the other side of the pond and is sent all over the world.

Val is a very highly qualified State Registered Nurse who knows whereof she speaks.

Here we go.

From: Valerie Robertson GAG 14 Hope all is well with all. All Quiet in the Western Front over this way. Seattle’s CHOP was liberated leaving an appalling mess The pubs are open today so the protesters have disappeared. BLMUK. is proving to be an embarrassment to those who donated, bent the knee and supported a cause that advocates the abolition of the nuclear family (that means dad is superfluous), defund the police, destroy capitalism and support censorship plus the necessity for every white person to acknowledge that they are all subconsciously racist and privileged, and own up to the “fact” that every institution is inherently racist and disproportionally White supremacy managed. That’s a big ask, which has bewildered the millionaire black footballers, academics & artists, Labour leader Sir Keith what’s his name, (why would a Labour leader accept a knighthood?) and all the national institutions taking the knee, which the other men in the street saw, as bowing to street fighter activists outrageous demands. Ie supporting racial divide and suppressing diversity of opinions and abolishing history. Our moral leader Canterbury Arch Runcton, is also confused. He’s a woke bloke that got it wrong at Easter. Streaming his Easter service from his kitchen with his toaster in the background. For God's sake, he must have a parlour with a row of books as a backdrop, in his palatial abode. He’s now having a think about the effigies in the Cathedral and wondering which ones to get rid of. Should he paint Jesus black? Jesus loves all the children of the world, be they yellow, black or white. What about the brown ones? They were precious in His sight too? He’s going to need a lot of colours. The Bournemouth beach sunbathing nutters are bright pink still. The Cambridge academia have just funded a two-year study into the history of slavery to enable the oiks to confront their iniquitous past and say sorry to all offended by history. Waste of time, as it’s been done before, over and over and you can’t change it. I’ve got a better idea for them to study. Research the Benin bronzes. There are 3,OOO of them but only 500 left in Nigeria, the rest in Europe and USA museums. They are exquisite. The Portuguese kicked off the Atlantic slave trade in 1400 from the port of Benin with gold, which the Africans turned into these fantastic plaques, I think but not sure. I’m too busy doing my epidemic virus studies to go to the British Museum and find out. And we are not allowed yet, to visit Portugal unless keen enough to fly to Spain and walk across the border to check up on the museum artifacts in Lisbon. It’s good to see Lewis Hamilton constructively addressing inequality in the motor racing world. The aggrieved black community can be placated and inspired by their own incredibly successful race if they listen. We have diversity, we have opportunity, we have laws, education, healthcare, social services, state welfare funding and overall, a tolerant multicultural society, who are very tired of the woke politically-correct champagne socialists agenda over the last decade. There are deep social and economic injustices which are nothing to do with slavery or racial prejudice. Lewis Hamilton lives in Monte Carlo to save paying a hefty U.K. income tax liability. He was raised in Stevenage and lived in a council house with his family partially supported by the welfare state. Is he a philanthropist who promotes the welfare of others by donating money for schools etc.? No he’s not if he’s a British citizen tax evader. Is he a Monacoan now.? Is he a hypocrite? I don’t know? Perhaps the academics can ask the uni students to research, write a paper and make up their own minds. Estate agents will not in future be using Master Bedroom in their ads. Connotations of slave masters etc. Uncle Bens rice is to be repackaged without the jolly black man, Aunt Jemima also and awaiting more news re. MasterCard, Master chef, Master Mind, Headmaster ( the lefty teachers union still keeping schools shut) Masters degree, a tricky one for Cambridge. We are living with the virus and hanging in with our self-imposed restrictions and socially distancing. The copper masks and latex gloves worked a treat when John needed to visit the GP surgery for a blood test to check prostate antigen level insomuch not coughing. Although London has seen a slight rise in the R rate, no doubt due to the mass protests, the infection rate remains stable and patients being more successfully treated with drugs, to avoid intensive care. The disproportionate ethnic infection rate is due to blood group, genetic disparity, and body mass ratio, and a difference in the percentage of T cells. These cells decline with age and are responsible for fighting off infection without causing a major auto-immune response. People past 65, have very few left. This theory explains why the young can come in contact with the virus but don’t succumb, however, if repeatedly exposed will catch it and manufacture antibodies and can still remain asymptomatic. Mass testing suggests that 40 percent of the population has been exposed with few symptoms, the silent spreaders who have the herd immunity. So we know the virus is still around and can’t trust the idiots to self-isolate if positive. All we can hope for is that they wear a mask and keep away from the elderly. Once the herd immunity and those who have recovered from it reach 60 percent, providing the medically vulnerable and fatties avoid it, the virus will find no host, cannot, therefore, multiply and shed and theoretically die away. So it’s a balance. As the months go on there is hope for more preventive medication to alleviate the symptoms and of course a vaccine. Last October, the WHO found that U.K. and USA were the best in the world prepared for a pandemic. Cameron had placed an order for millions of PPE equipment with a French company with the deposit to fund the manufacturer to make it. By the time U.K. needed it, we got the deposit refunded but the stocks were needed in France and they had sold some items at a higher price, to Italy. That’s Globalisation for you and the free market. Meanwhile, a couple who were distilling boutique gin in the midlands, altered their equipment to distill hand sanitizers and viral cleansing fluids as NHS were buying it in from abroad at an inflated price. They now supply the NHS cheaply and in the past 12 weeks have made 30 million pounds profit. Well done as they are donating a substantial amount to Covid research. No doubt as a tax saving incentive, but still commendable. There’s a lot to be said for self-reliance. The govt. with its 80 strong SAGE - the Scientific, Advisory Government Epidemic advisors, have caused the pandemonium. At the outset, the models and graphs predicting the scale have been proved wrong. Simple precautions were overlooked. Emptying geriatric wards, filling up care homes with staff untrained in infection control was scandalous. Mask wearing should have been made compulsory on public transport, supermarkets and shops at the outset and at least some sort of temperature checking and contact tracing at airports and ferries. So, onto local lockdowns and long term containment. Boris is getting on with Brexit and left Hanlon to contain the virus, Hope the strategy works. I have faith in the laboratory’s scientists and the trials and the guinea pigs testing the emerging vaccines. Meanwhile, tomatoes coming along, being well-nourished and in good shape and we are up to four playing again at croquet. Sainsbury delivering without hassle and Miles and Giles still surprising me with a tablespoon of Baharat in a nifty environment-friendly container. It made the lamb taste different. The kennels are open but missed the boat as all the rescue dogs are adopted and long waiting lists for puppies.

A dog called Nigger, I imagine a black or brown Labrador, who was loved and died in 1878, had a headstone in the animal cemetery in a Sussex village graveyard. The local stonemason has ground away the name as the villagers thought it might cause offence to visitors and that dog’s owners would understand as they were dead anyway and not around to ask permission. Just love kind people. The drought's over and it’s cool as we are and hope you are too. Take care Love from Val And from your fearless leader,Gordon

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armeniaitn · 4 years

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Emerging Europe this week

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/economy/emerging-europe-this-week-29339-03-07-2020/

Emerging Europe this week

Central Europe

The downturn in central European manufacturing eased markedly in June as economies reopened after the coronavirus lockdown, surveys showed on Wednesday, but the sector was still some way from returning to growth. Manufacturing output plunged as the pandemic brought many plants to a standstill in March and April. Restrictions started to be eased in May. While economists say the worst has passed, central banks and governments in Poland, Hungary and Czechia forecast gross domestic product will shrink by three to eight per cent in 2020.

Croatia is holding a parliamentary election this weekend amid a coronavirus outbreak and with no clear winner in sight. The ballot on July 5 will take place as Croatia, like other parts of Europe, contends with a renewed spike in reported virus cases that followed the reopening of borders and easing of lockdown rules. The country’s current conservative government, which initially handled the public health crisis relatively successfully, is seeking continued support from voters. But polls have suggested a liberal coalition has a slight lead over the ruling Croatian Democratic Union.

Romania’s government on Wednesday laid out its post-Covid recovery plan, promising 100 billion euros of investment to reboot the economy. The plan includes investment in infrastructure, as well as grants and state aid schemes for a variety of companies and industries. The government said its goal was to increase Romania’s GDP members to 87 per cent of the European Union average by 2025. Romania will receive 33 billion euros from the EU’s 750 billion-euro Covid-19 recovery fund.

French hospitality group Accor said on Thursday it aims to open up to 50 hotels under several brands in the coming years in Romania. The company is actively looking for opportunities in the market and plans to open seven new hotels this year in Romania, it said in a press release announcing a partnership for a new ibis hotel near Bucharest’s main airport Henri Coanda. “Accor aims to consolidate a network of 45-50 hotels in Romania under different brands in the coming years. We are actively looking for opportunities in the market, so that we can offer owners and potential investors our full support, the tools that we have at our disposal, as well as our distribution network and expertise,” said Accor Eastern Europe head of development Frank Reul.

Austrian high-tech firm S&T said this week that it had agreed a deal to acquire Slovenian information and communications technology provider Iskratel Group for 37.5 million euros. Kranj-based Iskratel provides ICT to operators of telecommunications, railway and energy networks, as well as to the industrial automation sector.

Czech state-owned hard coal mining group OKD has shut all of its mining operations for six weeks as it battles an outbreak of coronavirus infections. The mines, in the country’s east near the Polish border, have been the Czechia’s main hot spot of new cases in the past few weeks. OKD supplies the northeastern Czech industrial region, near the borders with Poland and Slovakia, with 4 million tonnes of coking and thermal coal per year.

Mate Rimac, the Croatian founder of high-performance electric car maker Rimac Automobili has criticised Croatia’s “obsession” with EU funds. “We’re all looking at this European bag of money and trying to grab a bit of it, and that’s a problem. I think we expect too much from EU funds and that we invest too much time and effort in withdrawing that money, instead of turning to building our own businesses and seeking private investment,” said Rimac.

Bulgaria’s professional football league was fined just 3,000 levs (1,534 euros) following numerous social distancing rules violations during the country’s domestic cup final on Wednesday. Thousands of CSKA Sofia and Lokomotiv Plovdiv fans broke rules for occupying every second row and every second seat in the stands, and refused to wear protective face masks at the Vasil Levski national stadium in Sofia.

Eastern Europe

The International Monetary Fund urged Ukraine on Thursday to maintain the independence of the central bank after Governor Yakiv Smoliy unexpectedly resigned, citing “systematic political pressure”. The negative fallout from Smoliy’s resignation prompted the finance ministry to say it was not going ahead with a planned offering of dollar-denominated Eurobonds. Smoliy’s resignation from the National Bank of Ukraine risks derailing a five billion US dollar deal agreed with the IMF last month to fight an economic slump exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Armenia’s economy will contract by four per cent in 2020 due to the negative impact of the coronavirus pandemic, but is expected to recover and grow 5.5 per cent next year, Martin Galstyan, the country’s central bank head, said on Tuesday. The central bank had previously forecast a contraction of 0.7 per cent this year after growth of 7.6 per cent in 2019. The worst-affected sectors of the economy are services and construction as well as international tourism, Galstyan said while presenting the bank’s quarterly inflation report.

The World Bank Group has approved a 45 million euros loan for Georgia to help the country mitigate the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The World Bank said that the loan was the second in a series of three lending operations as a part of its broader support for Georgia. The first was a financial support package worth 80 million US dollars provided to address the health and social impact of the pandemic, while the third tranche will focus on small and medium enterprises and jobs affected by Covid-19.

Workers on Azerbaijan’s Bahar and Gum-Deniz oil and gas fields have reportedly been threatened with dismissal if they do not sign contracts reducing their salaries by 20 per cent. Employees also claimed not to have been paid for the last two months. Mirvari Gahramanli, the head of the Committee for the Protection of Oilmen’s Rights, a Baku-based NGO, said that oil firm Bahar Energy – which owns the rights to 80 per cent of the Bahar and Gum-Deniz fields – was violating Azerbaijani labour legislation.

North East Europe

Latvia says it has banned the state-controlled Russian television channel RT for as long as network head Dmitry Kiselyov remains on the European Union’s sanctioned persons list for his alleged role in promoting propaganda in support of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. Along with being a news executive, Mr Kiselyov is a widely-known journalist and a TV presenter in Russia. He is subject to sanctions in all EU territory. Latvia said it would inform media regulators in other EU member nations of its decision and is urging them to also ban RT.

Russia has told the UN atomic watchdog there have been no nuclear incidents on its territory that could explain elevated but still harmless levels of radioactive particles detected on the Baltic Sea last week, the UN agency said on Tuesday. A separate body, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), which watches for nuclear weapon tests, last week said that a monitoring station in Sweden had found higher-than-usual levels of caesium-134, caesium-137 and ruthenium-103. The CTBTO said they were produced by nuclear fission.

NATO has put a defence plan for the Baltic states and Poland into action after Turkey dropped its objections, officials from Lithuania, Poland and France have said. The plan for Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, details of which are classified, was drawn up at their request after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. It was approved at a NATO summit in London in December. But Turkey did not initially allow NATO chiefs to put the plan into action unless they recognised the Kurdish YPG militia in northern Syria as a terrorists.

Even though Lithuania’s economy stood up to the initial shock of the coronavirus pandemic relatively well, the real fallout from Covid-19 will be felt in the autumn, a presidential advisor said on Thursday. “The economic fallout of the pandemic is likely to manifest itself the most in fall through a higher level of unemployment and stalling export markets,” Simonas Krėpšta told the LRT Radio. The country’s unemployment rate has already started to climb, he added. “The processes in the economy are rather inert. We see what is going on in our export markets, in the European Union, which is expected to suffer one of the biggest economic downturns since World War 2,” Krėpšta said.

South East Europe

The near-term outlook for the Albanian economy remains challenging, reflecting the significant impacts from the November 2019 earthquake and the Covid-19 pandemic, said the International Monetary Fund this week following a staff visit to the country. As in other parts of the world and reflecting Albania’s dependence on tourism and remittances, the economy is expected to contract sharply in 2020 and see a rebound in 2021. The IMF also expressed concern over plans to exempt all small businesses from profit tax and VAT.

Serbia has tightened Covid-19 restrictions again after recording its highest spike in coronavirus cases since April. Three hospitals in Belgrade, after a break of just a month, have been transformed back into coronavirus-only facilities. “The beds fill up at an express speed as soon as they are made available to patients with Covid-19,” a doctor from one of the hospitals told news agency AFP. After coming through the first wave of the epidemic in early May, Serbia has seen a resurgence in the number of cases, officially rising from around 50 daily infections a month ago to more than 350 on July 2.

Zijin Bor Copper, the Serbian unit of China’s Zijin Mining Group, plans to invest 1.12 billion euros in capacity and equipment overhaul, as well as environmental and safety improvements at the Bor mining complex, deputy managing director Simon Ling said this week. “In a year and a half since we took over RTB Bor, we have invested about 600 million euros. We believe in the future of the company in Serbia and we do not intend to reduce the investment,” added Mr Ling.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s autonomous Bosniak-Croat Federation on Tuesday raised 50 million Bosnian marka (25.5 million euros) through an auction of 12-month treasury bills, aimed at helping it plug budget gap and finance maturing debt, the Federation’s finance ministry said.

The European Commission said it has presented to the European Union member states the draft negotiating frameworks for North Macedonia and Albania, thus paving the way to the formal opening of the accession negotiations with each country. The proposals – which establish the guidelines and principles for the accession negotiations with the candidate countries – were built on a revised enlargement methodology aimed to make the accession process more credible, with a stronger political steer, more dynamic and predictable, the Commission said in a statement on Wednesday.

Read original article here.

#Armenia #Covid-19 #Economy

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sciencespies · 4 years

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The Science of Fear, the Royal Scandal That Made France Modern and Other New Books to Read

https://sciencespies.com/nature/the-science-of-fear-the-royal-scandal-that-made-france-modern-and-other-new-books-to-read/

The Science of Fear, the Royal Scandal That Made France Modern and Other New Books to Read

To confront her crippling fear of heights, journalist Eva Holland jumped out of an airplane and learned to rock climb. But while she endured these experiments with a semblance of aplomb, she found that the experience did little to assuage her fears. “I was facing my fear, but it was hard to imagine my resulting feelings, or my control over them, ever improving,” explains Holland in Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, one of five new nonfiction titles featured in Smithsonian magazine’s weekly books roundup.

The latest installment in our “Books of the Week” series, which launched in late March to support authors whose works have been overshadowed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, details Holland’s nerve-racking exploits, the stories of 50 forgotten female innovators, a 19th-century royal scandal that unmade France’s Bourbon dynasty, an investigation of how street addresses reflect race and class, and an overview of St. Louis’ turbulent history.

Representing the fields of history, science, arts and culture, innovation, and travel, selections represent texts that piqued our curiosity with their new approaches to oft-discussed topics, elevation of overlooked stories and artful prose. We’ve linked to Amazon for your convenience, but be sure to check with your local bookstore to see if it supports social distancing-appropriate delivery or pickup measures, too.

Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear by Eva Holland

When Eva Holland’s greatest fear—her mother’s untimely passing—was realized in 2015, she decided to embark on a journey of self-discovery, examining “the extent to which her many fears had limited her … and whether or not it was possible to move past them.” Nerve, a work that contextualizes Holland’s personal phobias by delving into the latest scientific research, is the product of this years-long quest.

As Holland writes in the book’s prologue, she began by breaking down fear into three “imperfect” categories: phobias, trauma, and the ephemeral. From there, she set out to answer key questions, including how and why humans feel fear, whether a cure for fear exists, and whether there is a “better way to feel afraid.”

Over the course of her research, Holland grappled with her own fears, interviewed individuals who have a rare disease that prevents them from feeling fear and met with scientists working to cure phobias with a single pill. Though she freely admits that she “can’t say that I am now in perfect control over my fears,” the journalist does note that her relationship with fear is forever changed. With Nerve, Holland hopes to instill these same lessons in others.

She adds, “Fear is an experience that unites, even as, in the moment, it makes each of us alone.”

The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask

Street addresses, argues Deirdre Mask in The Address Book, convey crucial information regarding their demographic details, including race, wealth and identity, of those who live there. These numbers and names also reflect power—“the power to name, the power to shape history, the power to decide who counts, who doesn’t, and why.” As Mask writes in the book’s introduction, addresses come in handy when directing ambulances where to go, but at the same time, they “exist so people can find you, police you, tax you, and try to sell you things you don’t need through the mail.”

Take, for instance, rural West Virginia, which had few street addresses prior to 1991, when a telecommunications company began an unprecedented address-making campaign aimed, “quite literally, [at putting] West Virginians on the map.” Locals, who had long been accustomed to providing directions based on geographic landmarks rather than street names, viewed the initiative with suspicion, writes Mask.

Mask explores the tensions raised by street names—and the ripple effects of not having an address—through case studies of Nazi Germany, a Haitian cholera outbreak, ancient Rome and other communities across four continents. Per the New York Times’ review of The Address Book, the book is surprisingly encouraging for a story on “class, poverty, disease, racism and the Holocaust,” drawing on a “cast of stirring meddlers whose curiosity, outrage and ambition inspire them to confront problems ignored by indifferent bureaucracies.”

The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern by Maurice Samuels

The July Revolution of 1830 is perhaps best known for ending the Bourbon dynasty’s rule in France. But as Maurice Samuels writes in The Betrayal of the Duchess, the uprising had at least one unexpected side effect still evident in modern French society: namely, the rise of rampant anti-Semitism.

Samuels traces France’s pervasive anti-Semitism to the 1832 betrayal of Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Sicile, duchesse de Berry, by her trusted advisor, a “seductive yet volatile man” named Simon Deutz. The duchess, mother of the 11-year-old heir to the crown, had been exiled in the aftermath of the July Revolution, but far from placidly accepting this unwelcome turn of events, she rallied supporters and led a guerrilla army tasked with restoring the Bourbon dynasty to the throne. De Berry evaded authorities for six months, but on November 6, 1832, was found hiding in a Nantes home. Upon emerging from a secret compartment, she reportedly said, “I am the duchesse de Berry. You are French soldiers. I entrust myself to your honor!”

Deutz, the man responsible for the duchess’ discovery, was a Jewish convert to Catholicism who gave up his former confidant for a small fortune. In the aftermath of the betrayal, according to Samuels, the duchess’ supporters came to view Deutz’s action as emblematic of modernity—in other words, a “symbol for the evils … ushered in by the French Revolution.”

Adds Samuels, “The story transformed resistance to modernity into a passion play with the Jew as villain and, in so doing, helped make anti-Semitism a key feature of right-wing ideology in France.”

The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson

As the geographic center of the United States of America, St. Louis has seen more than its fair share of historical happenings. In The Broken Heart of America, historian Walter Johnson traces the city’s evolution—including Lewis and Clark’s 1804 expedition, the Missouri Compromise, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, and the 2014 uprising in nearby Ferguson—from the nation’s “most radical city” to an urban center marred by racial inequality.

“The story of human geography of St. Louis is as much a story of ‘Black removal’—the serial destruction of Black neighborhoods and the transfer of their population according to the reigning model of profit and policing at any given moment—as of white flight,” writes Johnson in the book’s introduction.

Imperialism, capitalism and racism have long coalesced in St. Louis, but far from being a representative city at once torn between “east and west, north and south,” the historian argues, the Missouri capital has, in fact, “been the crucible of American history,” much of which has “unfolded from the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness in the city of St. Louis.”

Anonymous Is a Woman: A Global Chronicle of Gender Inequality by Nina Ansary

Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own contains several sayings that have since become mainstays in the feminist lexicon. The 1929 essay’s title, for example, is commonly used to describe the privacy and independence needed to foster female creativity. Anonymous Is a Woman, a new offering from women’s rights expert Nina Ansary, derives its title from another oft-repeated Woolf quote: “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

In keeping with the British writer’s line of thinking, Anonymous Is a Woman explores the stories of 50 female innovators whose accomplishments have been largely overlooked. Beginning with En Hedu-Anna, an Akkadian woman who was the world’s first known female astronomer, and ending with Alice Ball, a 20th-century American chemist who discovered a treatment for leprosy, the book uses short biographical sketches illustrated by artist Petra Dufkova to unravel 4,000 years of gender inequality. As Ansary writes in the book’s opening chapters, “It was a challenge to select only fifty women. … [D]espite formidable cultural barriers, women have developed their skills and talents, employed their intellect and creativity, and achieved distinction in diverse endeavors.”

Proceeds from the sale of Anonymous Is a Woman will be donated to the Center for Human Rights in Iran and the London School of Economics Centre for Women, Peace and Security.

#Nature

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dynamicprojectadvisory · 5 years

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Prosper Your Business with an Efficient Financial Advisor

As a business owner, you must be dealing with lots and lots of financial transactions. If you want to make the best and proper utilization of your finance, then hiring an efficient financial advisor in London will be the best pick.

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It has been aptly remarked that a duly qualified accountant is a boon to an organization. With best and up-to-date services, it may be ascertained to let the business move ahead.

Business Being Taken Care at the Best

Love your business a lot? It is time to take care of the fact that your finance is managed in a proper way. Getting associated with a team of efficient financial advisors will definitely take best care of financial transactions of your business.

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If you want to enjoy a stress free life to carry out with business transactions, shaking hands with an efficient financial advisor will be the right choice.

#financial_advisor #financial_experts

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stickyreviewcreation · 3 years

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We are French Accountants in London. We offer French Speaking Accountants, French Auditors, French Tax Advisors & Payroll Services in London.

Visit: https://thakur-chabert.com/french-desk-by-nature/

#French Accountants in London #French Auditors in London #French Tax advisor #French payroll services in London

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Treasure Island: Leak Reveals How Mauritius Siphons Tax From Poor Nations To Benefit Elites

REPORTING BY Will Fitzgibbon | Published July 23, 2019 | ICIJ | Posted July 26, 2019 |

Bob Geldof’s firm wanted to buy a chicken farm in Uganda, one of the poorest countries on earth. But first, an errand.

After soaring to fame in the 1980s for organizing Live Aid and other anti-famine efforts, the former Boomtown Rats rocker had shifted to the high-powered world of international finance. He founded a U.K.-based private equity firm that aimed to generate a 20% return by buying stakes in African businesses, according to a memorandum from an investor.

The fund’s investments would all be on the African continent. Yet its London-based legal advisers asked that one of its headquarters be set up more than 2,000 miles away on Mauritius, according to a new trove of leaked documents.

The tiny Indian Ocean island has become a destination for the rich and powerful to avoid taxes with discretion and a financial powerhouse in its own right.

One of the discussion points in the firm’s decision: “tax reasons,” according to the email sent from London lawyers to Mauritius.

Geldof’s investment firm won Mauritius government approval to take advantage of obscure international agreements that allow companies to pay rock- bottom tax rates on the island tax haven and less to the desperately poor African nations where the companies do business.

“One little wad of cash can be the difference between a poor country building big infrastructure or not,” a Ugandan tax official told ICIJ.

Another benefit of a headquarters on Mauritius: opacity. Transactions to and from Mauritius to local units – that can have huge impacts on tax liability – are tucked away in confidential financial reports filed on the island.

A spokesman for Geldof’s firm, 8 Miles LLP, said its investors include international development finance institutions that “request that we consolidate their funds in a safe African financial jurisdiction for onward investment into the various target African countries. Because of its reputation, Mauritius is used by many private equity investors for this purpose.”

The spokesman said the firm’s African investments follow high standards “to create jobs, improve communities…and by generating increasing tax revenues which support the governments where we operate.” The spokesman said, “Only when we sell a company will the sale proceeds be paid back into the fund in Mauritius.”

Geldof declined to comment.

Mauritius Leaks, a new investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 54 journalists from 18 countries, provides an inside look at how the former French colony has transformed itself into a thriving financial center, at least partly at the expense of its African neighbors and other less-developed countries. In Uganda, more than 40% of the population lives on less than $2 a day.

Based on a cache of 200,000 confidential records from the Mauritius office of the Bermuda-based offshore law firm Conyers Dill & Pearman, the investigation reveals how a sophisticated financial system based on the island is designed to divert tax revenue from poor nations back to the coffers of Western corporations and African oligarchs, with Mauritius getting a share. The files date from the early 1990s to 2017.

The island, which sells itself as a “gateway” for corporations to the developing world, has two main selling points: bargain-basement tax rates and, crucially, a battery of “tax treaties” with 46 mostly poorer countries. Pushed by Western financial institutions in the 1990s, the treaties have proved a boon for Western corporations, their legal and financial advisers, and Mauritius itself — and a disaster for most of the countries that are its treaty partners.

“What Mauritius is providing is not a gateway but a getaway car for unscrupulous corporations dodging their tax obligations,” said Alvin Mosioma, executive director of the nonprofit Tax Justice Network Africa.

The leaked records – including emails, contracts, meeting notes and audio recordings – provide a glimpse inside a busy offshore law firm working with global accounting and advisory firms for some of the world’s largest corporations and some very wealthy individuals.

They’ve all found their way to an island built on helping the rich avoid paying taxes to nations as far-flung as the United States, Thailand, and Oman.

Mauritius’ minister of financial services of good governance Dharmendar Sesungkur, who oversees the country’s offshore sector, said that ICIJ’s information was “outdated.” The minister said that independent organizations, including the World Bank, recognize that “Mauritius is a cooperative and clean jurisdiction that has made significant progress in adhering to international standards.” [Read the Government of Mauritius’ full response]

Mauritius has introduced “major policy (as well as legislative) changes,” Sesungkur said. Prime Minister Pravind K Jugnauth recently announced tighter rules for companies that want to benefit from the island’s low tax rates; such companies must have greater control and activity in Mauritius and more skilled employees.

Pampering elites in the Persian Gulf

In 2012, American philanthropist Craig Cogut and his multibillion-dollar private equity firm, Pegasus Capital Advisors, looked 9,217 miles from the firm’s home base in Stamford, Conn., for a place to locate the management headquarters of one of its new investments. What unfolded is a textbook case of the way businesses can prosper by using Mauritius’ offshore tools.

A Pegasus fund had bought Six Senses, a luxury spa and hotel brand with more than 30 operations on four continents. Frequented by Hollywood stars and other global glitterati, Six Senses drips in luxury. Villas on private islands in the Seychelles, off East Africa, cost as much as $15,000 a night. The Al Bustan Palace spa in Oman, one of the less affluent countries on the Arabian Peninsula, offers private men- and women-only beaches and personalized face scrubs made with locally grown clove and myrrh.

The Six Senses brand, which promotes “caring for hosts [employees] and local communities” in marketing materials, was a natural addition to Pegasus’ portfolio. The firm, with $1.5 billion under management, invests in socially conscious companies that, among other things, recycle food waste and create drugs to treat diarrhea in disadvantaged children. “We care not just about impact alone, but making a ‘net-positive’ impact,” Cogut wrote in 2018.

In May 2012, Pegasus created a company, Sustainable Luxury Mauritius Ltd., with a post office box in the Ebene, the island’s technology hub. The new company was owned by a British Virgin Islands corporation that Cogut owned personally, according to documents.

Sustainable Luxury, which had no employees, received management income and fees for the use of the Six Senses logo at hotels and spas around the world, including two Six Senses operations in Oman, according to contracts that passed through the law firm Conyers.

As a “resident” firm of Mauritius, Sustainable Luxury could take advantage of the country’s super-low, effective maximum corporate tax rate: 3%. Sustainable Luxury also applied for — and received — special legal status from the government of Mauritius, allowing it to benefit from tax treaties between Mauritius and countries where Six Senses had spas and hotels. Treaties allow companies to reduce or entirely avoid common taxes received on cross-border payments, including interest, dividends and royalties.

Sustainable Luxury listed Oman among 11 countries where the company had investments and wished to apply for a special status and document issued by the government of Mauritius, according to company board meeting minutes. That document would allow the company to cut taxes paid to countries around the world that signed treaties with Mauritius. The leaked files don’t say whether the company ever received the document.

Linda Ambrosie, a researcher at the University of Calgary in Alberta, told ICIJ that shunting money through tax havens to avoid local taxes doesn’t square with the idea of “care for hosts and local communities” mentioned in corporate literature.

“Sustainable? Pffff,” scoffed Ambrosie, author of “Sun and Sea Tourism: Fantasy and Finance of the All-Inclusive Industry,” a study of how cruise ships and the multinational travel and resort industry in the Caribbean avoid taxes while exaggerating their contributions to employment, public revenue and environmental protection.

“Sustainably is, first and foremost, a tax issue,” she said, “because whatever you try to do to make a destination more sustainable, like providing fresh water or good roads, needs taxes to pay for it.”

Pegasus and Cogut did not respond to requests for comment.

From sugarcane to shell companies

A longtime possession of the Dutch, French and then the British, Mauritius was for centuries a poor agrarian society with an economy based mostly on sugarcane. Its economic prospects seemed forever limited by its location, 1,250 miles east of the African coast, and tiny size, smaller than Rhode Island.

Then in the early 1990s, Rama Sithanen pushed an idea.

The Mauritius finance minister at the time, Sithanen observed that Luxembourg, Switzerland, Hong Kong and other, more obscure jurisdictions had grown into financial powerhouses by serving as low-tax gateways to wealthy nations nearby. He said Mauritius should do something similar, offering itself as a stable, corruption-free bridge to Africa and other less developed regions.

“The potential exists to explore new avenues and to look for new markets,” he argued before the Mauritius Parliament in 1992, pushing a bill that would make possible the island’s first shell companies and allow some firms to pay zero taxes on profits and capital gains. One parliamentary colleague called the bill “a wonderful tax tool.”

An opposition member objected, saying the bill would create at least the appearance that Mauritius was benefiting at the expense of poorer neighbors.

“It is a tough world,” retorted another government minister in support of the law. “We cannot waste time.”

Within weeks of the bill’s passage, Mauritius officials were off on marketing trips to Asia. In the law’s first year, 10 offshore companies incorporated in Mauritius. Two years later, that number had passed 2,400.

Tax treaties proliferate

A key part of the island’s strategy: tax treaties, lots of them.

Starting back in the 1920s, “double taxation agreements” were adopted to protect businesses with international operations from being taxed twice for the same transaction. Two nations simply agreed on dividing one set of taxes between them. To encourage investment, tax treaties also limited the tax rate governments could apply to certain cross-border transactions.

Tax treaties surged as global trade blossomed after World War II; a second wave came during decolonizations in the 1960s and 1970s. Under the umbrella of the Western-dominated Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, richer countries pushed for treaties that awarded most of the tax revenue to themselves, not the poorer countries where the business activity took place.

Officials in some developing countries sensed early on that the system was tilted against them. Among their complaints: Western companies were shifting income out of developing countries by inflating “expenses” and “fees” paid to the home office, reducing local taxable income. “They have taken out of Zambia every ngwee [penny]” owed in taxes, Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda fumed in 1973.

Developing countries believed they had to enter into treaties to attract foreign investment, even if it meant signing away tax revenue that could fund education, health care and other vital government services.

Many experts say that treaties often aren’t even necessary. Western governments can, and often do, solve the double taxation problem by granting credits or other relief to domestic companies with overseas operations.

Aid from poor to rich

By 1974, an academic paper was already warning that the treaties in effect represented “aid in reverse – from poor to rich countries.”

Nonetheless, the number of treaties surged again in the 1990s as Western corporations and their advocates within international institutions pushed them as a requirement for attracting foreign investment. Meanwhile, tax havens, seeing an opportunity, dropped their tax rates, encouraged corporations to set up shell “headquarters” in their countries, and promoted tax treaties as a way to avoid paying taxes.

People didn’t even know where Mauritius was located. People mixed things up between Mauritius, Maldives, Malta . . . a lot of small islands starting with the letter ‘M.’ – Nishith Desai

For Mauritius, a big breakthrough came in the early 1990s when an enterprising lawyer in Mumbai discovered that a then-dormant 1982 India-Mauritius tax treaty would allow his Western clients to avoid paying taxes in both the United States and India. Western money poured into the newly liberalized Indian market – after first passing through Mauritius.

“Success has many fathers,” said the lawyer, Nishith Desai, in an interview with ICIJ. “People didn’t even know where Mauritius was located. People mixed things up between Mauritius, Maldives, Malta . . . a lot of small islands starting with the letter ‘M.’ ”

Gushing press releases and news articles suggested that Mauritius was on a path to becoming the Hong Kong or Singapore of the Indian Ocean. “We avoid stacks of tax,” one fund manager told Toronto’s Financial Post in 1994.

Mauritius introduced a flat corporate income tax rate of 15% with foreign tax credits that can drive that down to an effective rate of 3%. Mauritius rolled out Global Business Licence 1, which allows companies with operations elsewhere to be “resident” in Mauritius for tax purposes and pay its low rates. It went on to sign dozens of tax treaties with countries around the world, including 15 in sub-Saharan Africa.

Lately, tax treaties have begun to fall out of favor. A growing chorus of government officials, academics and international institutions have concluded that the treaties are responsible for siphoning vital tax revenue from the world’s poorest nations and are a key driver of global wealth inequality.

Research on 28 treaties signed with the Netherlands found that they cost poorer countries collectively at least $1 billion a year in lost tax revenue, and probably much more.

Another study found that 40 treaties Belgium signed with former African colonies and other countries cost them a total of $44 million in 2012, while providing only modest increases in investment. Studies of Austria, Finland, Switzerland and Denmark also showed that treaties exacerbated tax avoidance in poorer countries.

By 2013, almost half of all foreign investment in India could be traced to companies in Mauritius, according to the United Nations. Under its treaty, India had granted Mauritius the sole right to tax capital gains when a Mauritius company sold shares in an Indian company.

The problem? Mauritius doesn’t tax capital gains, meaning companies avoid such taxes in both countries.

In a 2018 study, Tsilly Dagan, an Israeli law professor, flatly called the common justification for tax treaties “a myth.” “Developing countries … have to sacrifice more to become members of the ‘treaty club.’”

Poorer countries push back

Some countries have tried fighting back – but it’s not easy. Renegotiations can take years. Political leaders often seek to avoid the diplomatic fallout.

South Africa signed a new treaty with Mauritius, which first ignored South Africa’s requests to modify the 1997 text and then resisted for years, according to people involved. Western corporations lobbied the South African parliament to reject the renegotiation and threatened to move their offshore operations to Dubai. The new treaty took effect in 2015.

“The old treaty basically gave the store away,” said Lutando Mvovo, a former South African treasury official who took part in the negotiations.

Successive Indian governments for years challenged the legality of the Mauritius 1982 treaty. And they kept losing. In a landmark 2012 case, India’s Supreme Court held that the tax office could not question U.K. telecom giant Vodafone’s $11 billion acquisition of an Indian rival through a Mauritius company. The decision cost India $2.2 billion in lost tax revenue.

It took 20 rounds of negotiations over 20 years for India to prod Mauritius in 2016 to remove the abusive provisions of the original 1982 treaty, one Indian official told ICIJ.

In separate interviews with ICIJ, tax officials in Egypt, Senegal, Uganda, Lesotho, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Thailand, India, Tunisia and Zambia all said their treaties with Mauritius were crippling.

“Personally, we regret signing the treaty,” said Setsoto Ranthocha, an official with the Lesotho Revenue Authority, now involved in a renegotiation effort. Lesotho’s treaty with Mauritius dates to 1997.

“The companies are the winners,” Ranthocha said. “It makes me go mad.”

Namibia is reviewing its treaty with Mauritius, officials told ICIJ partner The Namibian. In March, Kenya’s high court struck down that country’s treaty with Mauritius for technical reasons. Tax Justice Network Africa filed the complaint, arguing that the treaty would allow companies to abusively “siphon” money out of Kenya. In June, Senegal announced that it would seek to cancel its tax treaty with Mauritius, claiming that the agreement cost it $257 million over 17 years.

“It is the most unequal treaty for Senegal of all the treaties we have signed,” Magueye Boye, a tax inspector and Senegal’s lead treaty negotiator, told ICIJ. It is an “enormous pipeline for tax avoidance,” he said.

Another country reviewing its treaty with Mauritius is Uganda.

In July 1984, Geldof witnessed the famine then devastating Ethiopia and returned home to co-write the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” He persuaded Phil Collins, Boy George, Bono and more than a dozen other rock stars to record it, creating one of the best-selling hits of all time. “And in our world of plenty, we can spread a smile of joy,” they sang.

In 1985, Geldof launched the Live Aid concert of top-tier rock stars held in London and Philadelphia that raised more than $140 million for famine relief. He received an honorary knighthood the next year at age 34.

Geldof has continued to speak publicly in support of African economic development. In 2004, he joined then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair to launch an anti-poverty Commission for Africa, singling out Uganda as a particular case of blight and misery.

In a later interview, Geldof discussed the importance of growing small and medium-sized businesses and an expanding middle class on the continent. “Once the state can tax proper income, it can begin to cohere, it can pay its police, its courts, its army,” he said.

In 2008, two decades after Live Aid, Geldof co-founded 8 Miles, the Africa-focused private equity firm that bought a majority stake in the Ugandan chicken farm.

Named after the shortest distance between Europe and Africa – at Gibraltar – the firm said it aimed “to deliver improved environmental, social and governance outcomes in the creation of market-leading African companies.”

On its website the for-profit firm says it aims to “contribute to the economic development of the countries in which the Fund invests.” It promotes investments in “companies to inspire Africa” and hopes to make substantial returns for investors, according to a confidential memorandum. It has signed the U.N.-supported Principles for Responsible Investment, which commit companies to respecting environmental, social and other corporate standards.

But in an annual financial report filed with U.K. regulatory authorities, the firm says its “principal objective” is “creating capital growth and realizing capital gains.” The fund raised about $150 million and by 2017 had invested nearly all of it in eight companies, according to an 8 Miles financial statement for that year filed in the United Kingdom.

8 Miles has taken stakes in an Ethiopian wine company, a Ugandan bank and an Egyptian manufacturer of resins for lacquer, varnishes and plastics. Among the investments in 2014 was $9 million in Biyinzika Poultry International Ltd., Uganda’s leading chick producer. The company’s name means “With God, all things are possible.”

Leaked Conyers Dill & Pearman records reveal that 8 Miles spent thousands of dollars on advice and services that might reduce taxes. Advisers repeatedly raised tax issues, including discussions on investment vehicles preferable for “tax reasons,” according to emails.

Under “taxation implications” in a business plan dated March 2013, Conyers employees wrote that the partnership “may require a tax residency certificate” to “benefit from the double tax agreement network.” Four of the seven African countries in which the fund’s companies operate had a tax treaty with Mauritius at the time of the fund’s investments.

The partnership eventually set up a Mauritius management company, Eight Africa Management (Mauritius) Ltd., which received a Global Business License and became eligible for Mauritius tax rates, according to the 8 Miles 2017 annual report.

The 8 Miles spokesman told ICIJ that: “The companies we invest in, pay all taxes in their home jurisdiction in Africa” and sale proceeds are paid back into Mauritius only after a company’s sale.

The fund declined to provide financial records from Mauritius that could detail management fees and other money flows.

8 Miles said tax treaties “are a matter between the governments who sign these agreements and we comply with such agreements but we do not make them.”

Ugandan tax officials say that corporate abuse of the treaty with Mauritius has been rampant. In December 2018, Uganda sent four officials to Mauritius to renegotiate the agreement. Mauritian officials resisted changes to the most troublesome elements of the treaty, one participant told ICIJ.

“It’s a very bad treaty,” a Ugandan tax official told ICIJ. “Lots of problems.”

Batting for tax avoidance

When 8 Miles wanted offshore advice, it turned to the Mauritius arm of Conyers Dill & Pearman.

Founded in Bermuda in 1928 by Reginald Conyers, a speaker of the island’s parliament and a first-class cricketer, the firm is widely credited with creating the world’s first-ever offshore company. The “exempted” Bermuda company (not subject to requirements imposed on local companies) benefited members of the American Noble family, heirs to the Lifesavers candy fortune.

In a history of Conyers published in 1998, one attorney is quoted as describing a typical client as someone “who would rather spend $10,000 on legal bills than pay $5,000 to Uncle Sam.”

Documents from Mauritius Leaksidentify companies from United States, Europe and Asia, as well as homegrown African investors, among Conyers’ clients.

In a section marked “not for publication” in its 2017 submission to a law firm-ranking competition, Conyers listed eight confidential clients. One of the eight was the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, which Conyers advised on a $3 billion loan to MTN Group, Africa’s largest mobile phone company. Conyers also said it guided the $65 billion merger of two gas and engineering companies. Accompanying this particular disclosure was this emphatic statement: “CONYERS’ INVOLVEMENT IN THIS MATTER IS HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL (AS IS ANY MAURITIUS CONNECTION ETC).” The documents do not suggest these transactions involved tax avoidance.

In 2017, three Conyers directors, Sameer Tegally, Ashvan Luckraz and Sonia Xavier, bought Conyers’s Mauritius assets. They renamed the business-management operation Venture Corporate Services and the law practice Venture Law Ltd.

As part of the sale, a local accounting firm proposed three routes for the directors to avoid or reduce taxes paid on the sale in Mauritius, according to draft tax advice.

Tegally, Luckraz and Xavier did not respond to questions, including any tax advice they did or did not follow.

And where there are tax shelters, there are Big Four accounting firms. KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte and EY all have offices on Mauritius.

In 2015 KPMG advised Ubongo Group, Africa’s largest producer of educational children’s television programs, whose shows reach 11 million households in 31 countries. Eyeing an expansion, the Tanzania-based company predicted a 35-fold increase in revenue over six years, according to a financial model.

KPMG provided advice on the “economical means of Ubongo Mauritius extracting profits from Ubongo Tanzania,” according to a Ubongo planning document. One KPMG suggestion was that the Mauritius subsidiary lend money to the Tanzanian one, so that the money used to repay the loan would be taxed at 3% in Mauritius rather than 30% in Tanzania.

Ubongo told ICIJ that it took advice from KPMG about how to grow across Africa, but did not follow through with the plans or recommendations. “We canceled the investment round before receiving any funds, and instead re-registered as a non-profit organization to better align our funding and structure with our mission,” Ubongo told ICIJ.

KPMG did not comment on specifics, but said its “tax professionals act lawfully” and “with integrity.”

‘No nefarious agenda’

Mauritius’ tax benefits are popular with African elites as well as foreign ones.

Patrick Bitature owns telecommunications, energy, media and hotel companies across Uganda. One of Uganda’s richest men, who once sat on the boards of one-third of the companies on the Kampala Stock Exchange, Bitature has been close to Uganda’s authoritarian president, Yoweri Museveni, according to The Indian Ocean Newsletter, a respected news outlet.

He is also majority owner of Electro-Maxx, which runs Uganda’s largest thermal power plant, located in the eastern town of Tororo. It is the first African-owned and financed company to produce power on the continent.

In 2011, the investment company African Frontier Capital LLC proposed a $17.5 million investment in Electro-Maxx that passed through a newly incorporated Mauritius company named African Frontier I LLC, according to minutes of the African Frontier board. The proposal included a $2.5 million personal loan to Bitature, the minutes say.

The company’s minutes, dated June 2011, also said it would apply for a tax residency certificate every year to “benefit” from the tax treaty between Uganda and Mauritius.

Robert Mwanyumba, a tax researcher focused on East Africa, said that if the company used the treaty with Mauritius, it would have been subject to its low corporate income tax rate instead of Uganda’s 30% rate.

Bitature confirmed the existence of a “bona fide” transaction and said the use of a tax treaty was a question for African Frontier, which did not provide a comment on the subject.

Responding to ICIJ media partner The Daily Monitor, Bitature said that Electro-Maxx sought external financing when it could not raise money for a new project. “The transaction was carried out within the provisions of the tax laws and fully accounted for in tax returns shared with” the Uganda Revenue Authority, he said.

“All taxes if any” were paid, Bitature said, adding “there was absolutely no nefarious agenda.”

African Frontier Capital, via the Mauritius company African Frontier I, ended its investment in Electro-Maxx in 2014. It told ICIJ that the investment was “a completely arms-length transaction” that fully complied with the laws of the countries involved.

Under pressure

In January, after years of complaints from its treaty partners and under pressure from international institutions, Mauritius overhauled the tax laws governing its offshore sector.

Gone is Global Business License 1, the form of shell company that poorer nations denounced as an exploitative tax-avoidance tool.

Mauritius now requires investors to have reasonable local staffing and to spend money on the island that reflects the activities of a real office – known as “enhanced substance” – to benefit from tax treaties or low tax rates. Shell companies are a thing of the past, Mauritius assures outsiders.

They can say they’re doing it by the book, but the book is full of technical tricks, and Mauritius has some very skilled technicians. – Sol Picciotto

Bemoaning the new rules, one member of Parliament blamed the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations by ICIJ, among other exposés, for soiling the offshore industry’s reputation. “Under pressure from the OECD and the European Union, who have at heart only their interest to further tax their citizens and corporations, Mauritius, once again, has kowtowed,” lawmaker Mohammad Reza Cassam Uteem said.

Corporations, fund managers and tax advisers warned the changes would make Mauritius less attractive for investment.

Others, however, suggest that its reforms may be little more than box-checking designed to keep the country off international blacklists. Mauritius, they say, has already found ways to continue providing tax-avoidance opportunities.

The island reluctantly agreed, for example, to a rule that allows a Mauritius treaty partner to deny tax-treaty benefits to a multinational corporation that opens in Mauritius with the “principal purpose” of exploiting those benefits. Experts say that poorer countries will rarely be able to make use of that provision: Denying treaty benefits to a corporation will require technical, financial and political resources that a developing country may not have.

Sol Picciotto, emeritus professor at Lancaster University law school in England, said of Mauritius: “They play the game so as not to be denounced as uncooperative, but they can maneuver within the grey areas of the rules. They can say they’re doing it by the book, but the book is full of technical tricks, and Mauritius has some very skilled technicians.”

This year, Setsoto Ranthocha, the Lesotho tax official, negotiated with Mauritius to fix a treaty that he says has cost his country dearly. “They are tough negotiators,” Ranthocha said of his Mauritius counterparts. “They know what they are doing.”

Meanwhile, Mauritius is pursuing new treaties with 16 African states, bidding to bring its coverage to nearly 60% of the continent.

Contributors: Dean Starkman, Richard H.P. Sia, Fergus Shiel, Tom Stites, Joe Hillhouse, Delphine Reuter, Antonio Cucho, Emilia Diaz-Struck, Amy Wilson-Chapman, Gerard Ryle, Hamish Boland-Rudder, Miguel Fiandor Gutiérrez, Karrie Kehoe, Shinovene Immanuel, Lazarus Amukeshe, Ritu Sarin, Simon Mkina, Frederic Musisi, Tabu Butagira, Axcel Chenney, Jeremy Merrill and John Keefe.

#u.s. news #politics #politics and government #us: news #international news #must reads #world news #corruption #elections #humanrights #africa #news #trending news #latest news #africa news

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seakclauswinkler · 2 years

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Artcollector (AC ) secrets by german artist SEAK Claus Winkler:

Some professions from my AC‘s which I know of: german Highschoolteachers, Wirtschafter ( Pimp ), Ceo‘s , Restaurant owners, LifeCoach, IT specialist, Tax chancellory / familyoffice owner, Board of Directors, It programer, florist shop owner, international known football player (soccer), australian mining ceo, worldchampigonship winning basketballcoach, progammer from Colombia owning 2 large estates in Miamibeach, californian estate owner, LA tattoo artist, entrepreneures , privatiers, münster telefonmarketeer, Business / company owners, ad agency owner, talent agency booker, city cultural departments, french artmuseum curator, international fashion business senior directors & owners, international music artist (Djaying), painting artists ( international ), SF based curator from london, pharmacists, austrian stakeholder/ entrepreneur, dentist, senior Bankmanager, german business advisor living switzerland, ……

AC‘s not pick up the art I painted for them, due they loving it, paid for it in advanced. Incl being overwhelmed by the results. I do really need the space. It’s almost 3 1/2 years now. Please. Though thanks for letting having it for such a long time, seeing it myself.

AC‘s first investing in already existing painting before aquiring a painting to be painted.

An AC showing up on there bday buying himself paintings.

AC‘s sending there Driver with the limousine catching up the art.

AC sending a spedition with a huge empty truck for large pieces.

AC renting a large Sprinter himself, flying to cologne, catching the painting himself, driving it home.

#Modernart #modernartist #Moderne Künstler #Freie Künstler #Freier künstler #Bildender künstler #Art collector secrets #Art collector expierence #Artist effect #Artist influence #Galerie Erfahrungen

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ancientbrit · 4 years

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Natter #5 4th July 2020

MI MG Natter #5 4th July 2020I hope you all have had a happy fourth - all fingers still attached and tummies filled. Pickle seems to be getting used to the bangs this year, or perhaps he is a little deaf. Usually, at the first bang, he disappears and hides under my bed. This time he has wandered upstairs and downstairs and doesn't seem to register the bangs much at all - which is good. I am in contact with a guy back home who runs a regular allotment (PeaPatch here) blog, giving timely advice and other information related mostly to veggie & fruit culture. I find this very helpful as he jogs my memory on those extremely rare occasions when I forget. I know you think that I never forget, but I have to admit that there has been the occasional lapse ever since I stopped eating peanuts. Strange that. His words for July remind us that this month is the time to sow seeds for Fall and Winter veggie crops such as Chicory (does anybody actually grow this?), Chinese Cabbage, Kohl Rabi, Lettuce, French Beans, Beetroot, Carrots, Radish, Turnips, and Peas - pick early varieties - early Snow peas are especially fast to crop. If you have had the forethought to already start Leeks from seed, now is the time to plant out those starts. The easiest way to do this is to use an old broomstick handle and thrust it vertically into the soil to a depth of about 5-6". Just drop the seedlings, roots first into the holes and then just water in - that's all you need to do. The water will wash soil from the sides of the holes down onto the roots and it will remain cool and moist enough to thoroughly root the seedlings well. The idea of doing it this way, apart from the ease of planting and gaining support from the sides, is that the hole blanches the stem of the leek as it grows to gain more usable parts of the plant. If they are kept reasonably moist they should grow quite rapidly through the Summer and be ready to make fabulous potato-leek soup in time to keep cold days at bay. If you have never eaten P-L soup accompanied by chunks of Crusty artisan bread generously spread with butter - you haven't lived. Food of the Gods this! If you have been growing spuds and have lifted them already, you can follow with a crop of French beans to both nourish yourself and the soil, or if beans aren't your thing try a green manure crop such as Mustard. However, bear in mind that if you have ever had Club Root on your cabbage family plants, do not use Mustard as it is also a brassica. Use one of the Pea family, both for the Nitrogen root boost, but also for the foliage. And now for something completely different:- Once more my friend Valerie Robertson has presented her view on things English on the other side of the pond. From: Valerie Robertson GAG 14 Hope all is well with all. All Quiet in the Western Front over this way. Seattle’s CHOP was liberated leaving an appalling mess The pubs are open today so the protesters have disappeared. BLMUK. is proving to be an embarrassment to those who donated, bent the knee and supported a cause that advocates the abolition of the nuclear family (that means dad is superfluous) defund the police, destroy capitalism and support censorship plus the necessity for every white person to acknowledge that they are all subconsciously racist and privileged., and own up to that every institution is inherently racist and disproportionally White supremacy managed. That’s a big ask, which has bewildered the millionaire black footballers, academics, artists, Labour leader Sir Keith what’s his name, and all the national institutions taking the knee, which the other men in the street saw, as bowing to street fighter activists outrageous demands. Ie supporting racial divide and suppressing diversity of opinions and abolishing history. Our moral leader Canterbury Arch Runcton, is also confused. He’s a woke bloke that got it wrong at Easter. Streaming his Easter service from his kitchen with his toaster in the background. For God's sake, he must have a parlour with a row of books as a backdrop, in his palatial abode. He’s now having a think about the effigies in the Cathedral and wondering which ones to get rid of. Should he paint Jesus black? Jesus loves all the children of the world, be they yellow black or white. What about the brown ones? They were precious in His sight too? He’s going to need a lot of colours. The Bournemouth beach sunbathing nutters are bright pink still. The Cambridge academia have just funded a two-year study into the history of slavery to enable the oiks to confront their iniquitous past and say sorry to all offended by history. Waste of time, as it’s been done before, over and over and you can’t change it. I’ve got a better idea for them to study. Research the Benin bronzes. There are 3,OOO of them but only 500 left in Nigeria, the rest in Europe and USA museums. They are exquisite. The Portuguese kicked off the Atlantic slave trade in 1400 from the port of Benin with gold, which the Africans turned into these fantastic plaques, I think but not sure. I’m too busy doing my epidemic virus studies to go to the British Museum and find out. And we are not allowed yet, to visit Portugal unless keen enough to fly to Spain and walk across the border to check up on the museum artifacts in Lisbon. It’s good to see Lewis Hamilton constructively addressing inequality in the motor racing world. The aggrieved black community can be placated and inspired by their own incredibly successful race if they listen. We have diversity, we have opportunity, we have laws, education, healthcare, social services, state welfare funding and overall, a tolerant multicultural society, who are very tired of the woke political correct champagne socialists agenda over the last decade. There are deep social and economic injustices which are nothing to do with slavery or racial prejudice. Louis Hamilton lives in Monte Carlo to save paying a hefty U.K. income tax liability. He was raised in Stevenage and lived in a council house with his family partially supported by the welfare state. Is he a philanthropist who promotes the welfare of others by donating money for schools etc.? No he’s not if he’s a British citizen tax evader. Is he a Monacoan now.? Is he a hypocrite? I don’t know? Perhaps the academics can ask the uni students to research, write a paper and make up their own minds. Estate agents will not in future be using Master Bedroom in their ads. Connotations of slave masters etc. Uncle Bens rice is to be repackaged without the jolly black man and awaiting more news re. MasterCard, Master chef, Master Mind, Headmaster ( the lefty teachers union still keeping schools shut) Masters degree, a tricky one for Cambridge. We are living with the virus and hanging in with our self-imposed restrictions and socially distancing. The copper masks and latex gloves worked a treat when John needed to visit the GP surgery for a blood test to check prostate antigen level insomuch not coughing. Although London has seen a slight rise in the R rate, no doubt due to the mass protests, the infection rate remains stable and patients being more successfully treated with drugs, to avoid intensive care. The disproportionate ethnic infected is due to blood group, genetic disparity, and body mass ratio, and a difference in the percentage of T cells. These cells decline with age and are responsible for fighting off infection without causing a major autoimmune response. People past 65, have very few left. This theory explains why the young can come in contact with the virus but don’t succumb, however, if repeatedly exposed will catch it and manufacture antibodies and can still remain asymptomatic. Mass testing suggests that 40 percent of the population has been exposed with few symptoms, the silent spreaders who have the herd immunity. So we know the virus is still around and can’t trust the idiots to self-isolate if positive. All we can hope for is that they wear a mask and keep away from the elderly. Once the herd immunity and those who have recovered from it reach 60 percent, providing the medically vulnerable and fatties avoid it, the virus will find no host, cannot, therefore, multiply and shed and theoretically die away. So it’s a balance. As the months go on there is hope for more preventive medication to alleviate the symptoms and of course a vaccine. Last October, the WHO found that U.K. and USA were the best in the world prepared for a pandemic. Cameron had placed an order for millions of PPE equipment with a French company with the deposit to fund the manufacturer to make it. By the time U.K. needed it, we got the deposit refunded but the stocks were needed in France and they had sold some items at a higher price, to Italy. That’s Globalisation for you and the free market. Meanwhile, a couple who were distilling boutique gin in the midlands, altered their equipment to distill hand sanitizers and viral cleansing fluids as NHS were buying it in from abroad at an inflated price. They now supply the NHS cheaply and in the past 12 weeks have made 30 million pounds profit. Well done as they are donating a substantial amount to Covid research. No doubt as a tax saving incentive, but still commendable. There’s a lot to be said for self-reliance. The govt. with its 80 strong SAGE - the scientific, advisory government epidemic advisors, have caused the pandemonium. At the outset, the models and graphs predicting the scale have been proved wrong. Simple precautions were overlooked. Emptying geriatric wards, filling up care homes with staff untrained in infection control was scandalous. Mask wearing should have been made compulsory on public transport, supermarkets and shops at the outset and at least some sort of temperature checking and contact tracing at airports and ferries. So, on to local lockdowns and long term containment. Boris is getting on with Brexit and left Hanlon to contain the virus, Hope the strategy works. I have faith in the laboratory’s scientists and the trials and the guinea pigs testing the emerging vaccines. Meanwhile, tomatoes coming along, being well-nourished and in good shape and we are up to four playing again at croquet. Sainsbury delivering without hassle and Miles and Giles still surprising me with a tablespoon of Baharat in a nifty environment-friendly container. It made the lamb taste different. The kennels are open but missed the boat as all the rescue dogs are adopted and long waiting lists for puppies. A dog called Nigger, I imagine a black or brown Labrador, who was loved and died in 1878, had a headstone in the animal cemetery in a Sussex village graveyard. The local stonemason has ground away the name as the villagers thought it might cause offence to visitors and that dogs owners would understand as they were dead anyway and not around to ask permission. Just love kind people. The drought's over and it’s cool as we are and hope you are too. Take care Love from Val And from your fearless leader,Gordon

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ashleydpalmerusa · 5 years

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Hey Y’all, Let’s Get Salty About These 2018 Elijah Watt Sells Award Winners

Whelp it’s that time of year again, the time when we recognize the efforts of an elite handful of CPA exam candidates whose performance on one of the toughest professional examinations out there ranks the best of the best. The AICPA handed out 110 Elijah Watt Sells Awards for 2018 last week, and as is tradition around these parts, we will recognize each and every one of them.

In order to qualify for the award, candidates must score at least a cumulative 95.50 across all four parts of the exam and pass each part on their first try. Additionally, 2018 award winners completed testing in that year.

Now, let’s get to recognizing, shall we? At the end, we’ll tally up the firm totals so we can hold a brief dick measuring contest, as is also tradition around these parts. TL;DR straight to the bottom if you’re looking for that.

Kelsey M. Alexander (Colorado), a graduate of University of Colorado Boulder with a BS in Business Administration and MS in Accounting, is employed with KPMG in Denver, Colorado.

Ruicheng Richard Bai (California), a graduate of University of California, Berkeley with a BS in Business Administration and a BA in Statistics, is employed with Deloitte Tax LLP in San Francisco, California.

Hayden C. Bauer (Kansas), a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a BBA in Accountancy and a Master of Accountancy from the University of Arkansas is employed with KPMG in Chicago, Illinois.

Michelle Bauer (Washington), a graduate of University of Washington with a BABA in Accounting and Information Systems, is employed with Moss Adams LLP in Seattle, Washington.

Bridget J. Bauman (Texas), a graduate of Texas A&M University with a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting & Business Honors and Master of Science in Accounting, is employed with Bray International, Inc., in Houston, Texas.

Alice M. Begovich (Virginia), a graduate of The University of Dayton with a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering and Master of Accountancy from The University of Tennessee is employed with Deloitte Tax LLP in McLean, Virginia.

Mary Kate Breese (Pennsylvania), a graduate of Grove City College with a BS in Accounting and in Finance is employed with Felix and Gloekler, P.C. in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Asher Brown (Oklahoma), a graduate of The University of Oklahoma with a BBA in Accounting and Masters of Accountancy is employed with Grant Thornton, LLP in Oklahoma City, OK.

Matthew Brooks (Texas), a graduate of Brigham Young University with a BA in French Studies and a MS in Accounting from The University of Texas at Dallas is employed with Deloitte Tax, LLP in Dallas, Texas.

John Browning (New York), a graduate of University of North Carolina at Asheville with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics in Economics; and Master of Science in Accountancy from Wake Forest University, is employed with KPMG in New York, NY.

Katherine Brunt (Texas), a graduate of Texas A&M University with a BBA in Accounting and Business Honors and a Masters of Financial Management is employed with EY, LLP in Dallas, Texas.

Emily Buzby (Florida), a graduate of the University of Florida with a BS in Accounting and MS in Accounting, is employed with KPMG in Jacksonville, Florida.

Guillermo Andrew Casay (Maryland), a graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park with a BS in Accounting and Finance is employed with the FDIC in Arlington, VA.

Joseph S. Cassata (Illinois), a graduate of DePaul University with a BSC in Accounting and Management, is employed with Wellen Capital in Chicago, IL.

Jamie Castor (Texas), a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a BS in Mathematics and Sports Management and an Advanced Technical Certificate in Accounting from Austin Community College, is employed with EY, LLP in Houston, TX.

Michaela K. Christian (Iowa), a graduate of Iowa State University with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Bachelor of Science in Finance, is employed with RSM US LLP in Des Moines, IA.

Nathan Claflin (Wisconsin), a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire with a BBA in Accounting, is employed with EY in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Margaret Collins (North Carolina), a graduate of Wake Forest University with a BS in Accounting and MS in Accountancy employed with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Douglas Coons (Nebraska), a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and a Master of Science in Accountancy from the University of Notre Dame is employed with Deloitte in Omaha, Nebraska.

Clare Creighton (North Carolina), a graduate of Rice University with a Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Sciences and Master of Accountancy from University of North Carolina at Charlotte, is employed with Richey May & Co. in Charlotte, NC.

Christopher D’Agostino (Michigan), a graduate of Walsh College with a bachelor’s degree in accounting is employed with Rehmann in Troy, Michigan.

Thomas Deal (Oregon), a graduate of Santa Clara University with a BS in Accountancy is employed with KPMG LLP in Portland, OR.

William Joseph Donohue III (Ohio), a graduate of The Ohio State University with a BSBA in Marketing and Master of Accountancy from Cleveland State University is employed with KeyBank in Cleveland, Ohio.

Michael Dougherty (Florida), a graduate of The University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Master of Accounting from The University of Florida (if applicable) is employed with Dixon Hughes Goodman, LLP in Jacksonville, Florida.

Gogo Duale (California), a graduate of Aston University with a BSc in Economics and Management, an MSc in African Development from the London School of Economics and a Certificate in Accounting from UCLA Extension is employed with KPMG in Los Angeles, California.

Jesse Eles (Connecticut), a graduate of the University of Connecticut with a BS in Accounting is employed with Ernst & Young in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Timothy Fallon (Alaska), a graduate of University of Wisconsin – La Crosse with a BS in Accountancy, is employed with KPMG LLP in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Sijie (Jessie) Fang (Illinois), a graduate of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a BS in Accounting and Marketing and MS in Accounting, is employed with KPMG in Chicago, Illinois.

Marielle Fesmire (California), a graduate of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a BA in Business Economics is employed with PwC, LLP in Los Angeles, CA.

Stephen Flessner (Maryland), a graduate of University of Maryland, College Park with a BS in Accounting and a BS in Finance is employed with EY, LLP in Baltimore, MD.

Brian P. Frey (District of Columbia; Virginia), a graduate of the University of Maryland with a BS in Accounting and a BS in Information Systems, is employed with KPMG LLP in Washington, DC.

Amy Fursa (Minnesota), a graduate of College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University with a BA in Accounting is employed with Ernst & Young, LLP in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Natalie Gilbert (Texas), a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin with a BBA in Accounting and a Masters in Professional Accounting, is employed with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Houston, Texas.

Sanyam Goel (New Hampshire), a graduate of Delhi University with a Bachelor of Commerce, is employed at Shyam Goel and Associates in New Delhi.

Katherine Griesemer (Tennessee), a graduate of Lee University with a BS in Accounting and Finance and is employed with Unity Dance Troupe in Cleveland, Tennessee.

Johnathan Grimaldi (New York), a graduate of Boston College Carroll School of Management with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Finance is employed with PwC in New York, New York.

Alex Gunnerson (Oregon), a graduate of Brigham Young University with a Bachelors Degree in Accounting and Masters of Taxation (also Brigham Young University) is employed with KPMG in Portland, Oregon.

Wesley Davis Guymon (California), a graduate of Utah Valley University with a BS in Accounting and MS in Accounting from Southern Utah University, is employed with CVF Capital Partners in Davis, California.

Caleb Guzman (Texas), a graduate of Texas A&M University with a BBA in Accounting and MS in Accounting is employed with EY, LLP in Houston, Texas.

Justin Henry (Wisconsin), a graduate of University of Wisconsin – Whitewater with a Bachelors of Business Administration in Accounting and Masters of Professional Accountancy from University of Wisconsin – Whitewater (if applicable) is employed with CliftonLarsonAllen in Madison, WI.

Tori Hardiek (Indiana), a graduate of Butler University with a BS and MS in Accounting, is employed with Somerset CPAs and Advisors in Indianapolis, IN.

Lauren Heller (Hawaii), a graduate of Rice University with a B.A. in Mathematical Economic Analysis and Master of Accounting is employed with J.P. Morgan in Houston, Texas.

Sarah Henderson (West Virginia), a graduate of University of Charleston with a BS in Accounting and Finance is employed with Suttle & Stalnaker, PLLC in Charleston, West Virginia.

Nathan Herrmann (Colorado), a graduate of Oklahoma State University with a B.S. and M.S. in Accounting, is employed with KPMG, LLP in Denver, CO.

Adam Heussner (Minnesota), a graduate of University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire with a BBA in Accounting, is employed with PricewaterhouseCoopers of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

James P. Hodson (Pennsylvania), a graduate of West Chester University of Pennsylvania with a BS in Accounting and Finance, is employed with EY in Philadelphia, PA.

Timothy Hubner (Illinois), a graduate of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor’s in Accounting and a Bachelor’s in Finance and is employed with KPMG in Chicago, Illinois.

Brenden Hull (Georgia), a graduate of the University of Georgia with a BBA in Accounting and International Business and a Master of Accountancy, is employed with CohnReznick LLP in Atlanta, Georgia.

Michael Janenko (Pennsylvania), a graduate of DeSales University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting and Finance and MBA from DeSales University is employed with Olympus America Inc in Center Valley, PA.

Laura Elise Jones (Texas), a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting and Master in Professional Accounting is employed with KPMG in Dallas, Texas.

Szu Yin Chen Keen (Oregon), a graduate of National Chiao-Tung University with a BA in Management Science and MBA from Willamette University is employed with Doty, Pruett, Wilson PC in Salem, Oregon.

Minjae Kim (Texas), a graduate of The University of Texas at Austin with a BBA in Accounting/Business Honors Program and Master in Professional Accounting, is employed with Analysis Group in Dallas, Texas.

Michael Kimble (Kentucky), a graduate of University of Louisville with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in Accounting and a Master of Accounting from William & Mary, is employed with BKD CPAs & Advisors in Louisville, KY.

Mizuki Kio (California), a graduate of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a BA in Business Economics is employed with Deloitte Tax, LLP in Los Angeles, California.

Katherine Kress (Wisconsin), a graduate of University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh with a BBA in Accounting, is employed with CliftonLarsonAllen LLP in Appleton, WI.

Collin Kuntz (Missouri), a graduate of Truman State University with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and a Master’s in Accountancy is employed with Bayer in St. Louis, Missouri.

Mike Lamers (Wisconsin), a graduate of University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BBA in Accounting and Finance, is employed with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Nathaniel Levy (Arizona), a graduate of Northern Arizona University with a Bachelors of Accountancy and Master of Business Administration (Accounting focus) from Northern Arizona University is employed with KPMG in Phoenix, Arizona.

Xiaoxuan Li (California), a graduate of UCLA with a Bachelor of Arts in Business Economics, is employed with Pricewaterhouse Coopers in Los Angeles, California.

Corey Lockridge (Tennessee), a graduate of Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Economics and a Master of Accountancy, is employed with PwC in Atlanta, GA.

Michael Lundberg (Utah), a graduate of Brigham Young University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting and Master of Accountancy Degree from Brigham Young University is employed with Grant Thornton LLP in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Benjamin C. Lyford (Missouri), a graduate of Missouri State University with a Bachelor’s of Science in Accounting and Master of Accountancy from Missouri State University is employed with BKD LLP in Springfield, Missouri.

Ziheng Ma (New York), a graduate of Hainan University with a BS in Accounting and a MS in Accounting from Fordham University, is employed with KCH & Co., P.C. in New York, NY.

Matthew Maley (Minnesota), a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BBA in Accounting and a Master of Accountancy is employed with General Mills in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Philip Mann (Texas), a graduate of Texas A&M University with a BBA in Accounting and MS in Accounting is employed with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Fort Worth, Texas.

Caleb Martin (Indiana), a graduate of IUPUI with a BSB in Accounting, Finance, and International Studies, is employed with Katz, Sapper & Miller, LLP in Indianapolis, IN.

Jennifer Mason (Arizona), a graduate of University of Phoenix with a Bachelor of Science in Business with a concentration in Accounting and Master of Science in Accountancy from University of Phoenix is employed with Kindly Care, Inc. in Gilbert, Arizona.

Ashley McDowell (Colorado), a graduate of University of Nebraska – Lincoln with a BS in Accounting and a Master of Professional Accountancy is employed with BKD, LLP in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Jake McElmury (Minnesota), a graduate of University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with a BSB in Accounting and Finance, is employed with Deloitte in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Ryan McMillen (Illinois), a graduate of University of South Carolina with a BS in Accounting and Finance and Master of Accountancy is employed with Ernst & Young, LLP, in Chicago, IL.

Max Michaels (California), a graduate of University of San Diego with a BA in Accountancy is employed with EY LLP in San Diego, CA.

Scott Mikus (Pennsylvania), a graduate of University of Pittsburgh with a BS in Accounting and Finance, is employed with BNY Mellon in Wilmington, Delaware.

Matt Moran (Illinois), a graduate of the University of Iowa with a BBA in Accounting and Finance, is employed with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Chicago, Illinois.

Joel Morris (Oregon), a graduate of Portland State University with a B.S. in Accounting and Finance, is employed with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Portland, Oregon.

Yusi Mu (California), a graduate of Nankai University with a Bachelor of Management and a Master of Accounting from University of Southern California, is employed with EY in Los Angeles, CA.

Patrick Nanna (Massachusetts), a graduate of Northeastern University with a BSBA in Accounting and MS in Accounting, is employed with Deloitte & Touche LLP in Boston, Massachusetts.

David Newell (Missouri), a graduate of Truman State University with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and is earning a Master of Accounting with Data Analytics from Villanova University and is employed with KPMG in St. Louis, Missouri.

Tom Neyer (Missouri), a graduate of University of Missouri–Columbia with a BS and MS in Accountancy, is employed with Grant Thornton in St. Louis, Missouri.

Sarah Olson (Illinois), a graduate of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a BS and MS in Accountancy is employed with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Chicago, Illinois.

Aaron Pannell (Florida), a graduate of Florida State University with a B.S. Accounting and a Master of Accounting from Florida State University is employed with EY in Tampa, FL.

Joseph Pearson (South Carolina), a graduate of Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Master of Accountancy is employed with Deloitte in Phoenix, Arizona.

Dustin S. Peck (Pennsylvania), a graduate of Messiah College with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting is employed with Trout, Ebersole & Groff, LLP in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Steven Pochini (Michigan), a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a BBA in accountancy and theology and an MS in accountancy is employed with Plante Moran in Ann Arbor, MI.

Allyson Randle (South Carolina), a graduate of Clemson University with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Master of Professional Accountancy from Clemson University is employed with Ernst & Young in Greenville, SC.

Kelsey Ray (Oklahoma), a graduate of Oklahoma State University with a BS and MS in Accounting is employed with EY in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Matthew Reid (Georgia), a graduate of Purdue University with a BS in Management, an MBA from Indiana University, and an LL.M. in International Finance from Goethe University Frankfurt, is employed with BrandSafway in Atlanta, Georgia.

Nicholas Reilly (Illinois), a graduate of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a BS and MS in Accountancy, is employed with BDO USA, LLP in Chicago, Illinois.

Oscar Ryland (Ohio), a graduate of Miami University with a BS in Accounting and Finance is employed with Grant Thornton LLP in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Anthony Salazer (Louisiana), a graduate of Tulane University with a Finance and Marketing Undergraduate Degree and a Master of Accounting Degree is employed with EY in New Orleans, LA.

Brandon Salk (Rhode Island), a graduate of Bryant University with a BS in Business Administration and MS in Taxation, is employed with Grant Thornton, LLP in Westborough, Massachusetts.

Anne Salloom (New York), a graduate of Holy Cross with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics and a Master of Science in Accounting and MBA from Northeastern University, is employed with PwC in New York, New York.

Matthew Sorensen (Minnesota), a graduate of The University of Minnesota – Twin Cities with a BSB in Accounting and Finance is employed with KPMG in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Andee Soza (Arizona), a graduate of Brigham Young University with a Bachelor of Science in Accountancy and Master of Accountancy from Brigham Young University is employed with KPMG, LLP in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Ted Spilde (Minnesota), a graduate of Hamline University with a BBA in Accounting and Master of Accounting with Data and Analytics from the University of Missouri is employed with KPMG in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Lawrence Stark (MA), a graduate of University of Vermont with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and Master of Accountancy from University of Vermont is employed with PwC in Boston, MA.

Regan B. Stewart (Texas), a graduate of Brigham Young University with a BS in Accounting and MS in Accounting is employed with EY LLP in Dallas, Texas.

David Stone (Maine), a graduate of the University of Southern Maine with a BS in Accounting and Economics and MBA from Thomas College, is employed with BerryDunn in Portland, Maine.

Cailin Yoho Thompson (West Virginia), a graduate of West Virginia University with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration in Accounting and a Master of Accountancy from West Virginia University is employed with Suttle & Stalnaker, PLLC in Parkersburg, WV.

Ryan Thorsen (Colorado), a graduate of Brigham Young University with a BS in Accounting and MS in Tax, is employed with KPMG in Denver, Colorado.

Sharon Tucker (Illinois), a graduate of Northern Illinois University with a Bachelor’s of Science – Accountancy, and Masters of Accounting Science, is employed with Tighe, Kress & Orr in Elgin, Illinois.

Kurt Urbanski (Indiana), a graduate of Purdue University North Central with a BS in Accounting is employed with Crowe LLP in South Bend, Indiana.

Vanessa Vandamas (Florida), a graduate of Florida International University with a Bachelor of Accounting and a Master of Accounting is employed with Deloitte in Miami, FL.

Kerry Walley (Illinois), a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago with a Bachelor of Science in Accounting is employed with True Partner’s Consulting, LLC in Chicago, IL.

Austin Wang (New Jersey), a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis with a BA in Japanese and Economics and MA in East Asian Studies and a Master in International Economic Policy from Sciences Po Paris, is employed with Inteplast Group in Livingston, New Jersey.

Kaylie Windham (Texas), a graduate of Texas A&M University with a BBA in Business Honors and Accounting and an MS in Accounting is employed with EY, LLP in Houston, Texas.

Warren Wolf (Arkansas), a graduate of Louisiana Tech University with a Bachelor’s of Science in Accounting and a Master of Accountancy is employed with the Louisiana Legislative Auditor in Monroe, Louisiana.

Siying (Clara) Yang (Illinois), a graduate of University of Notre Dame with a BBA in Accountancy and ACMS (Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statics) is employed with Deloitte in Chicago, Illinois.

Xiaoqing Ye (California), a graduate of Shanghai University with a BA in Economics and MS in Accountancy from San Diego State University is employed with BDO USA, LLP in San Diego, California.

Alexandra Yunker (New York), a graduate of Fordham University with a BS in Accounting and MBA, is employed with Grant Thornton LLP in Boston, Massachusetts.

Joe Zywicki (Michigan), a graduate of Michigan State University with a B.A. in Accounting and is employed with KPMG Deal Advisory in Chicago, IL.

Totals: Deloitte 10 EY 4 KPMG 20 PwC 5

Well dang, who saw that coming? I certainly didn’t. Good work, House of Klynveld!

Now, inb4 someone chimes in that the Watt Sells Award is stupid and its winners dumb for aiming for anything above a 75 since passing is all that matters in the grand scheme of things, it’s kind of cool that the AICPA recognizes exceptional performance on the exam. As they mention in their press release, it’s a prestigious award few achieve, one earned solely through effort. Award winners, you should be proud.

Plus there’s a $20,000 bonus for Elijah Watt Sells winners at some firms, at least there used to be. I’m gonna go ahead and assume that’s still the case as I’m too lazy to pick up the phone and call around to ask. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Congrats winners!

The post Hey Y’all, Let’s Get Salty About These 2018 Elijah Watt Sells Award Winners appeared first on Going Concern.

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lisarprahl · 5 years