What our clients say about us . Richard G, Rome

Having had poor experiences with several financial advisers during my first 14 years living in Italy, it was a great relief to meet Gareth Horsfall in 2006. 

Automatic exchange of information between the UK, Italy, Germany France and Spain.

The UK is in the process of piloting a multi lateral tax information exchange agreement between the four largest EU members, France , Spain, Germany and Italy. It is based on the model being adopted by the USA's FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) which the 5 countries agreed on with the USA last year.

It is being implemented primarily to minimise cross border tax evasion and for wider powers to exchange information.    And, of course, the hope is that all other EU member countries will be persuaded to  join the big 5 as part of a trend towards global tax information sharing arrangements.

The big question is, if someone is living in France and the UK receive tax information about this person, even though it does not directly relate to the UK because they are not resident there, would they still share the information to the French authorities?  My guess would be yes although we are very unlikely to know for sure.   However, the continued media coverage of corporate and individual tax avoidance at the moment suggests to me that the aim is to have a full and open network of tax information that will be freely available for any authority should they choose to access it.

Welcome to the United States of Europe.

If you think that this may affect you and you would like to know how to comply with Italian law whilst limiting your tax liabilities you can contact me on gareth.horsfall@spectrum-ifa.com or call me on 3336492356.

Offshore bank accounts and exchange of information.

Just this week I have been asked the same question in 2 separate meetings and thought it would make a good blog post.

The question:  Do offshore banks report information to the EU automatically now? 

The EU day of reckoning is getting closer than you might think.

Italy is in the news again today.  The first big event is that Giulio Andreotti has died aged 94.  I have to admit that I know little about his time at the top of Italian politics other than that which I have heard.  None of it was particularly good.  

The other big event is that ISTAT (The Italian statistics agency) has today announced that Italy's economy will shrink a further 1.4% in 2013 and that unemployment will reach 12.3% later this year.  Oddly they predict that Italy will return to growth of 0.4% in 2014.   A forecast that I would hardly place a substantial bet on being correct.  

But what does this mean for the average Expat living in Italy?