The ongoing outrage over special tax arrangements for big multinational corporations rightly centers currently on Luxembourg and on the brand-new European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, under whose premiership all of those advantageous arrangements were agreed there. The accompanying open secret, however, is how Luxembourg is not alone in its guilt in this regard. Ireland was actually pressured to take (limited) measures to rein in its own concessions to tax-avoiding corporations even before the issue blew up recently with the Luxembourg leaks, and EU Commission scrutiny is also being increased on some similar Netherlands measures, particularly what that country may have done to attract Starbucks.

Add to that infamous list Belgium, as well. However, a new report from La Libre Belgique describes one rather unique – indeed, some would say typically Belgian – approach taken there.

As you can see, the affair involves AB InBev, now the world’s largest brewing company, headquartered in Leuven, just to the East of Brussels. They have plenty of clout to force through their own sweetheart deal with any country that would want to host them, you would think. Indeed in 2011 the Belgian fiscal authorities permitted them to set up a “nameplate company” to which, in the usual fashion, they could use various accounting tricks to steer responsibility for more than €50 million of profits actually earned elsewhere and so be very lightly taxed on them, in most cases not at all.

This organization was set up in Brussels rather than in Leuven, perhaps to provide a sheen of “arms-length” propriety. Imagine its surprise when, last year, it found itself under investigation for its fishy tax arrangements by the Belgian tax inspectorate, the Inspection spéciale des impôts (ISI)!

Clearly, the left hand of Belgium’s tax authorities often does not know what the right hand is doing! This article does not reveal the final resolution of this investigation; it might still be ongoing, although in any event it’s likely that those authorities will go for consistency and call off the inspectors – rather than seize the opportunity presented by this bureaucratic cock-up, that is, to claim back what are surely millions of sorely needed tax-receipts from a scandalous arrangement that some official was browbeaten into approving in the past.

Really, given the mounting public outrage over these sweetheart tax deals you would think the relevant Belgian officials would think again about whether they might just want to shut this one down. It would be very good publicity; AB InBev (originally a truly Belgian company, anyway) is firmly embedded in the country so that it would be costly to move. At least these officials have effectively raised the cost of such arrangements to tax-avoiding multinationals, in the form of the uncertainty that henceforth must be part of their calculus as to whether to deal with the Belgian state.

Truly, it is the Autumn of Discontent in Europe. That’s why that phrase up in the headline might be a handy one to learn. It’s French of course: ras-le-bol, or “enough” as in “I/We’ve had enough!” People are unhappy with their governments and are taking to the streets. Just yesterday marchers representing Belgian unions flooded through downtown Brussels, while a minority topped off the day by setting fire to cars and skirmishing with the police. Such demonstrations are set to continue there today, while the Antwerp dockworkers and their local labor brethren are set to do the same there on November 24th.

Now that we’re talking about protesting crowds flooding the streets, the French surely cannot be far behind. Things are not going very well there economically either, and sure enough:

Even if you don’t know French, you can make out the word décembre there: they’re going to hold their fire until December. But wait: the next words after that are le patronat, and that means “bosses,” not “workers.” (And indeed, that fat-cat in the suit there does not look very proletarian.)

But things are going bad for these guys, too, at least according to the vice-president of one large (French) employers’ organization (Medef), Geoffroy Roux:

One SME boss kills himself every two days, the treasuries are bone-dry, business bankruptcies are up and the government adds practically every day a little tax here, a measure increasing complexity there, so there is really a sense of “Enough!” [ras-le-bol!].

The plan is for things to truly go down on 1 December, when most of the various French employers’ associations are calling upon small business-owners to “hit the streets,” both in Paris and in Toulouse. But really: can it be true that French bosses will display their anger with the same sort of mass demonstrations (with occasional violence) that working-class organizations use?

That M. Roux I previously quoted declared in a TV interview that, yes, “some will perhaps hit the streets” on 1 December, but that there will also be meetings and témoignages, which literally translates as “testimonials.”

There’s another way these business organizations will mobilize to get what they want, too. M. Roux does not include it in his list, but the Le Monde writer (uncredited) does give it a mention: stepping up their institutional lobbying.

Here’s the latest EU scandal – yes, with the new Commission not even a week old! – and it might be a biggie. It broke this morning:

Oooh, «accords secrets» – secret accords! They’re linked with that “343,” that’s the number of multinational companies to which the Luxembourg granted sweetheart tax deals to come and operate there. This has just emerged from a leak from the offices of Pricewaterhouse Coopers there, which itself earned handsomely in taking up the role of negotiating with the Luxembourg government on those companies’ behalf for these tax-breaks. According to the report cited in this piece in the Tribune de Genève,

While in Luxembourg the tax rate for companies is officially 29%, which is decent [honnête] in international terms, that often passes below 1% after negotiations with the tax authorities.

The important thing to remember here is that multinationals routinely distort their official accounts, through tricks that go under the general name of transfer pricing, to show as much income as they can as coming from a place like Luxembourg where it is subject to the least taxation. Of course, the income has really been overwhelmingly earned elsewhere, in other countries – and those countries thereby effectively have had legitimate tax revenues stolen from them, in often mind-boggling quantities.

The company names sampled in this brief piece are what you would expect: Apple, Amazon, Heinz, Pepsi, Ikea, Deutsche Bank, and also a handful of Swiss companies (as this Swiss newspaper notes): UBS, Credit Suisse, Lombard Odier private bankers (remind you at all of “odious”?), and others. Indeed, with respect to the American companies on this list, their management has to cheat governments out of taxes using techniques like these, in order to increase earnings – otherwise they can be sued by shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty! Behold the face of late twentieth-century/twenty-first century Capitalism!

What really makes this development juicy is of course the identity of the brand-new President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, who was Prime Minister of Luxembourg from 1995 to 2013 when presumably all or at least most of these sweetheart tax-deals were negotiated. Now, it’s true that it was pressure from the outgoing Commission that recently Ireland to close its notorious “double Irish” tax loophole (well, at least over the next four years) that enables multinationals to evade enormous amounts in taxes owed elsewhere. The legal justification wielded was that such generous tax terms in effect amounted to “state aid,” which is forbidden to EU member-states.

That same rationale can obviously be brought to bear now on these Luxembourgish arrangements. But will it? As @TeacherDude puts it:

Juncker is going to have to change his spots, and quick. This development is precisely the last thing the EU needs after last May’s elections that saw so many new MEPs elected from extremist parties, reflecting a souring on the EU on the part of the European electorate. Already Marine Le Pen, whose Front National is prominent among those extremist parties, is calling on Juncker to resign from his very new Commission President position .

Check out this happy playground picture: that smiling boy in the foreground, the other ones playing on a balance-beam behind.

Of course, it is not that at all. This picture was taken in Raqqa, the Syrian desert town now functioning as headquarters for the outlaw organization known as the Islamic State. The Danish there reads “IS steps up recruiting of children in Syria,” and what we see here is no less than military training, which for the young lad up front in particular involves crawling through that child-sized tunnel whose circular exit we see there.

The recruitment and use of child-soldiers in Syria is a growing problem, actually not isolated to IS but to almost all warring parties there, including groups such as the Free Syrian Army supported by the West. (I write “almost” because it’s possible that the forces of the Syrian government do not have to resort to recruiting children; they merely have a well-documented record of torturing and executing them.) But the IS forces take this beyond what has seen before, according to a child-protection advisor to UNICEF, Laurent Chapuis, who was interviewed for this Politiken article. Says Chapuis:

ISIS’ recruiting of children is possibly the clearest current example of of a new pattern of aggressive recruitment through ISIS’ use of social media. Social media are used to promote the group’s ideology, agenda and political vision, including the mobilization and use of children.

One obvious question, though: how do we really know about what the IS is allegedly doing with children at its own Syrian headquarters? After all, the deadly conditions for Western reporters wherever this Islamic group holds sway has been lamented for the “blindness” it results in, which both Western governments and publics have to deal with when trying to figure out what is really going on there.

It turns out, however, that there do exist certain information sources. That picture at the head of the Politiken article, and in the tweet, itself comes from a recently-formed group called “Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently” consisting of daring local residents there who gather photos and other information and then get that out to the wider world (yes, mainly via social media). This organization is headed by a certain Abu Ibrahim Raqqawi; here is his Twitter-feed (click on the image to go there):

(“Raqqawi,” by the way, is Arabic for “from Raqqa,” just in case you had any doubts that this is an alias.)

Lea Wind-Friis, the Politiken reporter who wrote the article, mentions trying to contact Mr. Raqqawi to gain information for it but failing, which is understandable. However, a writer for the respected American journal Foreign Policy did manage to speak with him earlier on, and his accounts of what is going on there form a substantial part of her article entitled Children of the Caliphate – in English, free, and published only last week, which recounts IS child recruitment and mobilization in detail – including teaching very young boys to behead people and to operate as suicide-bombers.

For those of you not of the higher education world, here’s a tip about one of the biggest scams plaguing it. For very many fields of study it’s the academic journals that make or break academic careers – publish or perish! – and those journals have in effect become monopoly providers. So they charge monopoly prices: universities pay incredible amounts yearly to leading publishers just for subscriptions. And as the cherry on the cake, those who write the scientific articles that are accepted for publication in these journals thereby give up all rights to them.

Doesn’t that sound like something that just shouldn’t exist in this glorious Internet Age, where “information just wants to be free”? I agree, but this piece from the Times Higher Education (formerly Supplement) shows that things are getting no better.

[Researchers] found that the amount [for journal subscriptions] paid to Oxford University Press rose by 49.2 per cent between 2010 and 2014. The amount paid to Springer rose by 36.3 per cent and the amount to Wiley by 33.5 per cent. The smallest rise – 17.4 per cent – was in subscriptions to Elsevier journals. Overall expenditure increased by 23.9 per cent.

That’s interesting – but since when did EuroSavant turn into a higher education blog, rather than a European foreign press blog?

You’re quite right. But fear not: what I wanted to bring to your attention was a recent high-risk attempt by Netherlands universities to do something about that, reported by Martijn van Calmthout of the Volkskrant.

At issue is so-called “open access” (a phrase translated unchanged into Dutch), namely free access to such journal articles, whose publication would be financed by one-time university payments. Ironically, the first target is Elsevier, the (relative) best-behaver in the Times’ article, but also the only Dutch one. The consortium of Dutch universities, the VSNU, is pushing for open access as soon as possible and has proposed to Elsevier that its member-universities pay a year’s worth of subscription-fees to it one last time, but thereafter switch over to open access to the titles the company publishes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Elsevier has rejected this offer; the company would prefer to keep getting the subscription-fees and charge extra for any open access. Talks have now broken off. These universities face the prospect, as of 1 JAN 2015, of having no more access to any new articles. (Old articles will still be available, though; furthermore, that is just on-line access that they will lose to new articles.)

The universities are not beaten yet, it would seem, as the State Secretary for Education in the Netherlands, Sander Dekker, has their back. He was publicly advocating back in early 2013 for the Netherlands to have een voortrekkersrol – that is, to be in the avant-garde – when it comes to open access. (Note that most Netherlands universities are publicly-funded; that scientific material scholars submit to journal publishers for them to make their monopoly profits on was likely heavily subsidized by the State.) The EU is also on the VSNU’s side – although, of course, the Commission has just changed regime, and scholarly journals are probably not top-priority for the new EU Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, Hungary’s Tibor Navracsics.

Meanwhile, VSNU has taken up negotiations with Springer and Wiley. “These talks are proceeding more smoothly than those with Elsevier, insiders report.”

Strange news from out of the Czech Republic, where it seems around 5.5 million liters (= 3,594 barrels) of oil from the state strategic reserve has just disappeared, according to Dagmar Klimovičová at Hospodářské noviny.

It appears the Czech government subcontracted the task of managing its strategic reserve to Viktoriagruppe AG, a German company headquartered in Munich. That was its first mistake; allowing Viktoriagruppe to take part of that reserve outside of the Czech Republic was its second.

The Viktoriagruppe company . . . has not been able to explain reasonably since 23 September where 5.5 million liters of this material has gone to from its German storage facilities at Krailling [just outside of Munich]. Rather, it has been firing employees as it faces legal proceedings from Czech and German customs and financial authorities.

Viktoriagruppe also runs oil storage facilities for the Czech strategic reserve – for now – at three separate sites within the Czech Republic. Not surprisingly, that state petroleum reserve company (known as ČEPRO) is now busy having the oil Viktoriagruppe stores there – 15 million liters of it, or 94,347 barrels – transferred to other facilities under ČEPRO’s direct control; that, together with doing the same with the remaining oil stored in Germany, is now “our primary interest” according to under-fire ČEPRO head Pavel Švager.

That oil still in Germany, according to this piece, is “many times more” than the 15 million liters ČEPRO is seizing back from Viktoriagruppe’s Czech facilities; journalist Klimovičová understandably won’t give the precise figure since, even though no doubt such a figure exists somewhere in the books, the real one won’t be known until the comprehensive audit of just how much Viktoriagruppe is holding there in Krailling for the Czech Republic is complete.

This isn’t the first such run-in ČEPRO has had with Viktoriagruppe, writes Klimovičová: just last summer there was another discrepancy, of around 700 million liters, discovered during another audit of the latter’s German holdings of the Czech reserve. Viktoriagruppe officials tried to blame the shortfall on losses due to the transport and storage processes, but ended up paying a CZK 500,000 (€17,960) fine anyway.

The larger issue though, of course, is that of storing one’s national “family jewels” on foreign soil, and therefore outside of direct national control. Perhaps it’s something to be avoided, whenever possible, as the Czechs are finally finding out now.

At least we are not talking here about the analogous case of the national gold supply: it is true that many countries have theirs stored outside their borders, for various historical reasons, at places like New York (mainly at the New York Fed) and London. I don’t know whether that applies to the Czech national gold supply; who knows what happened to it between Nazi and Soviet occupations of the country last century, and in any case what was left of it presumably was split with Slovakia during the “Velvet Divorce” at the beginning of 1993. The good news here – while also bad news – is that that petroleum reserve is now steadily dropping in value anyway, what with the recent fall in oil prices worldwide.

You would hardly know it – I write this on a sunny Netherlands 1 November Saturday afternoon with outside temperatures at roughly 18°C, a new historical record for the date – but a new speed-skating season is about to start here, as reporter John Volkers of the Volkskrant notes:

Still, check out Volkers’ particular take on the subject: that Tweet-text translates to “Gold does not translate to money [in Dutch: goud/geld; the similarity is etymological] for skaters.” And from the lede:

Barely eight months after overwhelming Olympic success, the conclusion is already dawning that gleaming gold has brought little to sport-skating.

I must have missed it – because, frankly, I didn’t care and didn’t want to give Putin the satisfaction – but the Dutch really tore up the speed-skating events last February in Sochi. Six individual medals, four team medals. Nonetheless: “Rich is what the skaters have NOT become from that success.”

Because, as we know, sports today are basically just another career choice, so that if you are really good at something then you go do it, and train hard to keep doing it, just to earn some substantial coin, right?

Now, it seems that speed-skating was a more reliable source of big money in the past, according to this piece. You see, much like professional bicyclists, skaters would join competitive teams that would gladly be sponsored by publicity-hungry commercial enterprises and/or entrepreneurs.

But that is no longer so much the case; old sponsors have withdrawn and insufficient new ones have come to take their place. More ad hoc paths to riches – and again, that’s apparently what it is all about – have to be found. Like that of Sochi Olympic champion (team pursuit) and current 1500m record-holder Koen Verweij who, although he continues to race for a sponsored team, also has picked up some lucrative TV gigs. But that is not so surprising, for as anyone who wants to click on the various links to photos of him I’m scattering around here can attest, he is unusually handsome – think a long-haired blond shark. Plus, he of course has the physique required of a champion speed-skater, featuring thighs that can be classified as “redwood.”

His less-photogenic victorious colleagues from Sochi, though – like that pair up there in the Twitter-picture, eh? – are having a rougher time of it financially. And to think they all could have simply studied hard and become accountants instead, and where would they be today – right?