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ransfers from a Luxembourg company to the US would have typically been subject to a withholding tax. Last year, after attracting the attention of Spanish tax authorities, Exxon quietly closed down the operation.

“Normally you would have to pay a 10 per cent withholding tax at source to send profits to the US,

Spain introduced the ETVE in the mid-1990s to encourage foreign investment, and better compete with Luxembourg and Holland for international companies seeking tax-efficient European holding structures. It also allowed for foreign companies to take advantage of Spain’s strong network of bilateral tax treaties with countries in Latin America, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, which can offer more favourable tax rates than other countries. Once the ETVE has been established all overseas dividends that are paid into it are exempt from tax in Spain, and can be easily moved on to a final destination, providing a small number of conditions have been met. Most importantly, corporation tax must have been paid in the country of origin on the dividends being transferred, and companies using ETVEs to house shareholdings in foreign subsidiaries must not be resident in any country identified by Spain as a tax haven.

In fact, Linthal is an ETVE used by Ambev, a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev, the Belgian-based brewer, to distribute dividends from several Latin American beer brands, such as Argentina’s Quilmes and Cervecería Boliviana Nacional, to its holding company in Brazil.

The company makes no secret of the fact it has not paid taxes on a large part of its profits. “We are continuing to generate significant cash offshore and repatriating this cash will result in significant tax consequences under current U.S. tax law,” the company’s chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer, said last week.

The other way is to move to what is called a territorial system, one in which countries tax only profits earned in those countries.

In this country, notwithstanding the high rate, the corporate income tax now brings in about 18 percent of all income tax revenue, with individuals paying the rest. That is half the share corporations paid when Dwight Eisenhower was president.

In total, the continent lost about $850bn between 1970 and 2008, the report said. An estimated $217.7bn was illegally transferred out of Nigeria over that period, while Egypt lost $105.2bn and South Africa more than $81.8bn.

Nigeria’s crude oil exports, mineral production in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa, and timber sales from Liberia and Mozambique are all sectors where trade mispricing occurs.

The bulk of Africa’s illicit transfers originated from west Africa, where 38% of all funds leaving the continent were generated. Profit-making activities in north Africa accounted for 28% of the flows, while southern Africa, central Africa and eastern Africa each made up about 10%, the report showed.

In 2008, 80 percent of adults aged 25 to 54 in the E.U. 15 were employed (and 83 percent in France). That’s about the same as in the United States. Europeans are less likely than we are to work when young or old, but is that entirely a bad thing?

And Europeans are quite productive, too: they work fewer hours, but output per hour in France and Germany is close to U.S. levels.

After all, while reports of Europe’s economic demise are greatly exaggerated, reports of its high taxes and generous benefits aren’t. Taxes in major European nations range from 36 to 44 percent of G.D.P., compared with 28 in the United States. Universal health care is, well, universal. Social expenditure is vastly higher than it is here.

So if there were anything to the economic assumptions that dominate U.S. public discussion — above all, the belief that even modestly higher taxes on the rich and benefits for the less well off would drastically undermine incentives to work, invest and innovate — Europe would be the stagnant, decaying economy of legend. But it isn’t.

Such disparities of demand conditions will undoubtedly persist in the future because European countries differ substantially in industrial composition and in a variety of economic policies.

EMU is meant to be a marriage made in heaven with no possibility of divorce.

At its peak, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines company employed more than 65,000 Zambians and carried out services like water delivery and waste collection for five cities in the Copper Belt Province.

Mining employment has dropped to just 30,000, half of its glory-days peak, and the job of maintaining all that company housing and infrastructure has reverted back to the government.

The stats identify Switzerland as Zambia’s primary export market. This is not an indicator that Zambia hosts a thriving chocolate and suspenders sector, but rather that its copper trades are booked in the jurisdiction where they are least likely to be taxed.

Many of the mining companies pay just 0.6 percent royalties to Zambia, far below the already-meager industry standard of three percent.

This is Namwile Uzondile, the director of a rural health education project.

Last year Namwile conducted a survey of prostitutes here in Kitwe, and found that at least half of them had education certificates, but couldn’t find work. Most had been married off early, 15 or 16, and since then had either left their husbands or lost them to AIDS.

First, you go to the tribal chief. Ninety-four percent of the land in Zambia is customary or traditional, no one has a title to it. It’s not just sitting there, people are living on it, farming, grazing animals, it’s just technically under the control of a chief.

In Zambia most of the chiefs require a gift just to get a meeting. This might mean taking them lunch at a restaurant in Lusaka, or it could mean buying their daughter a car—it’s up to them.

Another reason Zambia lacks skills is that some parts of the workforce operate as cartels. Take lawyers. Zambia only has 1,000 of them, and they’re concentrated where the money is: Lusaka (government), Copper Belt (mining) and Livingstone (safari tourists).

Last year, only six lawyers were admitted to the bar out of 164 who took the exam. The year before that, it was 16 out of 145. Keep in mind, these aren’t people coming in off the streets. These are people who have a law degree.

More than 60 percent of Zambia’s government revenue comes from the copper mines.

Taxing all this informal activity would be costly in both resources and voter goodwill. In 2012, Zambia collected just $2.3 million in income taxes from its citizens.

It goes as high up as you want to follow it. Michael Sata, the president of Zambia, appointed his uncle the finance minister, his nephew the deputy finance minister, his niece the local government minister, and cousins as ambassador to Japan and chief justice.

Zambia’s cabinet has ballooned to 20 ministers and 47 deputy ministers, the largest in Africa. With salaries three to four times higher than opposition MPs and each ministerial post bundled with perks like a company car, free fuel, house servants, and mobile phone talk-time, you get the feeling politicians aren’t jumping from opposition into government on moral sentiment alone.

In 2011, Zambia spent a total of $4.3 billion running itself. Stretch that to cover every man, woman, and child, and it amounts to just $325 per person per year. That amount—less than a dollar per person per day—has to cover education, health care, infrastructure, law enforcement, foreign debt … everything.

Now she goes all NGO. “Little government capacity,” she says, is the nicest way to put it. “There are simply no systems for routine government services,” she says. Getting a license, a permit, certificates, approvals to start work, visas for expats to fly down here—nothing is in one place, nothing is fast or easy.

“Sometimes we have to pay for the inspectors to come to our mines,” Jane says.

The conversation goes like this: Jane tells the local certification body that she needs an inspector to sign off for a permit. The local certification body tells her that they would be happy to come out to the site, but they don’t have fuel for their cars, or enough petty cash to pay per diems. Jane offers to pay their costs, but only their costs, and the payments aren’t related to clearing the inspection.

The company has even paid the police to follow up on complaints or to investigate thefts. “They say, ‘We don’t have this in our budget’ or ‘We’ll need you to pay for it,’” Jane says. So the company fixes the police cars, covers their travel expenses, treats them to lunch.

“We tell them, ‘The company I work for, we’re not going to pay up.’ But at the end of the day, they know you’re on a short timeline, and they aren’t.”

Thomas’ family told him his nephews didn’t need to be in school. From their perspective, that’s not totally irrational. In a country with so few formal jobs and so much competition for getting them, I can see how spending hundreds of hours, thousands of kwachas, on education would seem superfluous. Thomas’ daughter wants to become a lawyer. You could almost forgive Thomas if he told her that the bar exam failure rate is more than 90 percent, so what’s the use?

International investors pledged $750 million last year to build infrastructure.

Such a business “typically possesses some combination of a number of key attributes, among them the capability to raise finance for large new projects and the resources necessary to fund a high level of research and development spending to sustain technological leadership, to develop a global brand, to invest in state-of-the-art information technology and to attract the best human resources”.

Moreover, “one hundred giant firms, all from the high-income countries, account for over three-fifths of the total R&D expenditure among the world’s top 1,400 companies. They are the foundation of the world’s technical progress in the era of capitalist globalisation”.

This creates growing tension, as governments find “their” companies ever harder to tax or regulate.

The size of the banking sector and exposure to Greece were known risks but at that time there was no banking problem in Cyprus

The containers were part of a shipment going from Iran to Syria that was intercepted in Cypriot waters after a tip from the U.S. The president took the decision to keep the ammunition. [NOTE: An independent prosecutor found that Christofias has ignored repeated warnings and pleas to destroy or safeguard the ammunition, apparently in hopes of one day returning it to Syria or Iran.]

Instead, they started lobbying the Russian government to give them a loan that would help them finance the country for a couple more years, and Russia came through, unfortunately,

I say unfortunately because as a result the government could keep operating and accumulating deficits without taking corrective action.

The next important date was the October 26-27, 2011 meeting of the EU council in Brussels where European leaders decided to wipe out what ended up being about 80% of the value of Greek debt that the private sector held. Every bank operating in Greece, regardless of where it was headquartered, had a lot of Greek debt.

For Cyprus, the writedown of Greek debt was between 4.5 and 5 billion euro, a substantial chunk of capital.

The Basle II framework that governments adopted internationally, and that the EU supervisory framework during this period also incorporated, specifies that holdings of government debt in a states' own currency are a zero-risk-weight asset, that is they are assigned a weight of zero in calculating capital requirements.

the governments should have agreed to make the EFSF/ESM available for direct recapitalization of banks instead of asking each government to be responsible for the capitalization.

Following a downgrading in late June 2012, all three major rating agencies rated the sovereign paper Cyprus below investment grade. According to ECB rules, that made the government debt not eligible as collateral for borrowing from the eurosystem, unless the ECB suspended the rules, as it had done for the cases of Greece, Portugal and Ireland. In the case of Cyprus, the ECB decided not to suspend the eligibility rule.

The governments have created risk in what before last week were considered perfectly safe deposits. This is going to have a chilling effect on deposits in any bank in a country perceived to be weak. This will mean the cost of funding will increase in the periphery of Europe and as a result, the cost of financing for businesses and households will increase. That will add to the divergences we already have and make the recession in the periphery of Europe deeper than it already is. This is really a disaster for European economic management as a whole.