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”.

Listen to the podcast here!

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 Baker angry;
  • principles in life he’s been following;
  • a book Philip Baker 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 Baker 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.