Tax practitioners draw a sharp distinction between tax avoidance and evasion — the latter is cheating, amounting to fraud, while the former boils down to a taxpayer arranging his or her affairs openly to minimise tax. Much of the tax practitioner’s work consists of drawing contracts to minimise the tax burden.
The 79-member grouping of African, Caribbean and Pacific countries (48 sub-Saharan countries including Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe) known as the ACP bloc wrapped up its latest summit in the Mozambican capital, Maputo, last week, with delegates expressing a willingness to kick-start stalled global trade talks.
Some people are never happy, as Brian Cohen once remarked about an ex-leper. The Springboks have won all three of their home Tests against northern-hemisphere opposition, scoring 13 tries in the process, and yet everyone is queuing up to remind them that the All Blacks and the Wallabies are waiting around the corner.
It is easy to forget that most top cyclists have the physiques of jockeys or bantam-weight boxers. In a long stage race such as the Tour de France, which starts on Saturday, the game is ultimately decided by who can prevail in the high mountains. Tyler Hamilton is fit and ready to challenge Lance Armstrong this year.
Ralf Schumacher marked his 29th birthday on Wednesday knowing that his career with the Williams team may be over. Doctors in Germany said that he sustained two cracked vertebrae when he crashed at the United States Grand Prix on June 20. Doctors have forecast that Schumacher may be unable to race for up to 12 weeks.
Bafana Bafana find themselves having to win the game against Burkina Faso on Saturday in order to keep their destiny in their own hands for the qualifiers of both the African Cup of Nations and World Cup in 2006. All the teams in group two have three points and this weekend’s game against the Burkinabe presents Bafana Bafana with a good chance to pull away from the five other countries.
Paul Bremer, former American proconsul in Iraq, recently recalled his first impressions of the country he came to govern in May last year. ”As I drove from the airport, Baghdad was on fire,” he said. ”There was no traffic, and not one policeman on duty in the country.” Now, after transferring power to an Iraqi government on Wednesday, he leaves a city again in flames.
Former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay has spoken out for the first time since the company’s collapse and placed the blame for the firm’s failure squarely on the shoulders of finance chief Andrew Fastow. In a lengthy interview with the New York Times, Lay protested his innocence and spoke of his vilification in the media and the dramatic slump in his personal finances.
Unites States Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Wednesday that the militias which have terrorised western Sudan ”must be broken”, and described conditions in the region as a ”humanitarian catastrophe”. After visiting a refugee camp in northern Darfur, he said that controlling the Janjaweed militias was the only way to restore peace.
The mood among expatriates in Riyadh remains sombre. It is only a fortnight since the beheading of the American engineer Paul Johnson, and there is genuine fear of being shot at or kidnapped. The atmosphere is comparatively relaxed in Jeddah, on the Red Sea, where the government established its summer base two weeks ago for its four-month annual escape from the heat of the capital.