GLENCORE AND BP NAMED AS WORST OFFENDERS AT TOP OF TAX SECRECY TABLE

Subsidiaries mapped: BP boasted the most convoluted corporate structure

By Rob Davies
10:11 PM on 19th September 2011

BP and Glencore have been named as the worst offenders in a report detailing the extraordinary lengths to which companies go to cover up their tax affairs.

Pressure group Publish What You Pay (PWYP), which campaigns for greater transparency on tax from mining and oil firms, mapped the subsidiaries of multi-national firms to determine which were the most secretive.

In the mining sector, Glencore (down 17.7p to 437.075p) won the dubious honour of keeping its tax payments the most closely guarded.

Of 46 subsidiary companies, nearly half were based in ‘secrecy jurisdictions’, where requirements to publish detailed accounts and tax data are minimal.

Miners BHP Billiton (down 67p to 1934.25p) and Rio Tinto (down 120p to 3505.25p) operated far more subsidiaries, 462 and 926 respectively, but just 20 per cent were in secrecy jurisdictions and just 15 per cent at Anglo American (down 116.5p to 2407.25p).

Glencore said it ‘provided all the disclosure required of a FTSE 100 company listed on London and Hong Kong’.

BP (6.15p to 407.3p) boasted the most convoluted corporate structure, with some 1,491 subsidiaries, of which 25pc were in secrecy jurisdictions.

Shell (35.5p to 2057.25p) has 1273, 41 per cent of them in tax havens.

Raymond Baker, director of research group Global Financial Integrity, said: ‘This is about getting rich secretly and not having to account for such riches locally,’ he said.

PWYP wants mining and oil companies to publish tax payments on a country-by-country basis to show their contribution to host countries.

The campaign group’s report come amid legislative moves in the US and Europe to clean up the natural resources business.

Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-2039164/Glencore-BP-named-worst-offenders-tax-secrecy-table.html#ixzz1YT1i0uml