Ep.54 Philip Baker - a Latvian tax lawyer

Philip Baker is a barrister (37 y), King's Counsel, lecturer at the University of Oxford, LLM, PhD, MBA, an author of a book on Double Taxation Conventions, “A guru on treaty and and cross-border tax”

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.