Tax deal signed by nine more countries

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The UK will be provided with a wealth of information about companies and individuals registered in well-known tax havens after nine more countries signed up to international tax protocols.

Austria, Luxembourg and Singapore, a traditionally secretive banking jurisdiction, were among the countries adding their names to a list of more than 50 countries who have agreed to automatically exchange tax information, help foreign nations to clamp down on tax debtors and allow countries to conduct wide-ranging joint multiparty tax investigations.

The Austrian finance minister, Maria Fekter, hailed the news, announced at the OECD ministerial meeting in Paris, as a "huge step forward" for her country.

She said that signing the OECD's multilateral convention on mutual administrative assistance on tax matters would "increase Austria's ability to actively contribute to the current international effort to [tackle tax] base erosion and profit shifting".

After many decades of banking secrecy which have allowed foreign account holders to veil their assets, Fekter said "recent developments" had persuaded Austria of "the importance of such cross-border co-operation in order to minimise the opportunity for international tax avoidance and evasion".

Less than a month ago, Fekter branded the UK and its overseas territories as " the island of the blessed for tax evasion and money laundering" and called for a registry for disclosing the beneficiaries of trusts.

On Wednesday, without naming the UK specifically, Fekter repeated her call for more information about the true beneficiaries of hundreds of billions of assets, saying: "We should not only focus on … access to bank information but also for the disclosure of beneficial ownership and beneficiaries of corporations and trusts and similar entities in general."

However, Singapore's deputy prime minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, said UK overseas territories needed to come on board to ensure the convention functioned properly: "Signing the convention reflects Singapore's commitment to tax co-operation based on international standards, but the standards can only work if all financial centres come on board. Singapore will work with international partners to achieve that, so that … offshore jurisdictions like the British Overseas Territories move together."

The new tax protocols will also affect entities based in Luxembourg such as Amazon and will eventually allow for faster transmission of data to HM Revenue and Customs and other tax authorities around the world.

Amazon continues to face questions about its company structures after it was revealed that it pays meagre amounts of tax in the UK on sales of up to £4.2bn.

The OECD secretary general, Ángel Gurría, said that rewriting international tax rules had become one of the great challenges for finance ministers as many of the old frameworks had become irrelevant.

"The [international tax] rules which we have built since the 1920s were meant to avoid double taxation … the problem is we've moved from double taxation to double non-taxation.

"Now we don't tax anybody because we've built a set of codes and regulations and law … and culture … where we facilitate the fact that co-operations, through transfer pricing practises, put their profits in low-tax jurisdictions and therefore do not pay what would be considered to be their fair share."

He said that taxing IT companies such as Google and Amazon had become especially difficult as they were based in the "ether".

"You can move anywhere and it doesn't matter where you originate the information or where you register the company, basically the consistency is that they [the companies] want to pay less tax."

Gurría, who works closely with finance minsters in dozens of countries, spoke frankly about how the financial crises had precipitated a new era of tax co-operation.

Pushed by the G20, he said, the OECD had "made more progress in three years than in the 10 years before" in getting its member countries and others to sign up.

"This [work] is not against the corporations. We want to make sure the corporations have legal certainty, that they know they are not going to be double taxed or multiple taxed, but at the same time, it is appropriate they produce their fair share for society, especially at a time of very tight budgets where ministers are having to increase the taxes and are having to cut expenses."

He said taxing the "man on the street" wasn't economically desirable or even politically possible, so for many finance ministers the only option was "to cut, cut, cut more, rather than have a proper balance between revenue and the expense".