Ep.54 Philip Baker - a Latvian tax lawyer

In the podcast we discussed:

• his Order of the British Empire - for helping political refugees from China in the UK;

• his love to his family, sinology (the study of Chinese law, language, history, customs, and politics) and Arsenal;

• that there are already three generations of tax experts in his family - his father, himself and his son;

• his Latvian roots in several generations, and his involvement in developing the Latvian tax system;

• how a barrister can become a King’s Counsel; and the way how the Tax Chambers operate;

• work-life balance;

• minimum standards and best practices of protection of taxpayers;

• how AI can get it wrong when assisting the tax administration;

• the Post Office scandal, and the reports by Dan Neidle and the TV series - on how lives of so many people were ruined because of a software mistake;

• how a person can make Philip angry;

• principles in life he’s been following;

• a book Philip recommends - “Banking on Failure”, Cum-Ex and Why and How Banks Game the System by Richard S Collier; there was an interesting video of the book launch where Philip discusses the scheme together with Richard; the book itself:

  • includes a detailed description of cum-ex trade - the biggest tax fraud of its type in Europe;

  • has a never-before-seen explanation of the step-by-step evolution of a complex tax-driven structured financial product;

  • addresses the root causes of why banks are driven to create highly complex structured tax products;

  • contributes to the understanding of banks and their roles in exploiting tax systems;

• ethical obligations of tax lawyers not to advise on abusing the law;

• what enables tax fraud;

• the directions tax systems might advance to; Philip predicts:

  • non-dom tax rules will be abolished this year or the next;

  • digital services taxes will be implemented as the moratorium on it ends this June, and Pillar 1 is not going to happen; with the different DST systems a threat of double taxation will become relevant;

  • mostly big accounting companies are going to benefit from Pillar 2, not governments, because of huge compliance costs;

• why the progressive taxation is fair, incl. reduction of inequality;

• that a family taking an online business to Gibraltar had a tax dispute in the UK for 23 years;

• a pro-bono case at the European Court of Human Rights;

• we even discussed some politics too, incl. Brexit and the US president elections.