Financial Times: ‘It’s a Matter of Fairness’: Squeezing More Tax From Multinationals

Since the late 1980s, there has been a complete change in mindset, one pioneered and taken to its extreme by General Electric, America’s biggest manufacturer by market capitalisation for most of the past 40 years.

Under the late Jack Welch, who ran the company from 1981 to 2001, a tiny corporate tax team was transformed into a money-spinning entrepreneurial machine, with 1,200 tax lawyers spanning five continents.

The fruits: between 2008 and 2015 the company not only paid no federal income tax in the US, according to research by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, it booked positive tax benefits worth more than $1.3bn over the seven-year period.

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