Treasury in new 'u-turn'
If Alistair Darling is to signal a u-turn on the foreign profits rules, he's going to have to do better than this:
Clearly, we want to look at how these reforms might affect individual sectors, including those dealing with intellectual property. We are committed to a revenue-neutral package that enhances competitiveness while protecting UK tax revenues.
That's a 'Treasury source' quoted by The Times.
Ever since the review began, we've known it would be 'revenue-neutral'. There's nothing new there - the principle being that the Treasury loses money from exempting inbound dividends, and gains from the CFC rules-tightening.
It's how he does the latter that is causing the problems. It will be interesting to see what new ideas might emerge from the Treasury, but as yet, there seems no sign of any climbdown (nor, in fact, a realisation on the part of the government that it had 'climbed' anywhere - it was still insisting very recently that everyone had just 'misunderstood').
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