The Netherlands : Passengers out of Schiphol airport need to produce a useless certificate costing € 180 they have been tested Coronavirus negative

Need to travel somewhere by plane? On top of your ticket cost, also count on dishing out an additional € 180.00, to do a coronavirus test at a KLM approved Healthcare Services Center.

Inquiries, however, made with Government authorities (RIVM) show it is completely pointless to undergo a corona test if you have no symptoms. There is no proven validity to be linked to the result of these tests, because the results can vary from day to day.

The GGD -"Dutch Government municipal health organisation for preventive healthcare", will perform this Coronavirus test for free at local municipality health centers in the Netherlands,in case a local resident believes he or she has the symptoms of the virus. Unfortunately this free test is not considered acceptable by the KLM ticketing services at Schiphol.

Hopefully the government authorities will be looking at this absurd procedure, which looks more like a money making scam by the KLM Schiphol authorities.

Almere-Digest

Turkey - the Presidential elections: Erdogan wins following a rigged election and can now rule Turkey with very little opposition

Neutvoom says that a lot of investors "don't agree with his position on the central bank." Erdogan said last month from London that he wants greater control of monetary policy and suggested he wanted to control interest rates. This worries investors as it could mean a loss of independence at the central bank.Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won sweeping new executive powers after his so called "victory" in landmark elections on Sunday.

But Erdogan was not the only person to claim a victory. His Islamist-rooted AK Party and its nationalist allies also secured a parliamentary majority
.
But what do the election results mean for Turkey and the rest of the world?

Turkey's currency has fallen some 20% this year against the dollar. Erdogan has repeatedly called on Turks to convert their euro and dollar savings into lira to help bolster the ailing currency.

While Erdogan's victory is likely to be positive for the lira in the short term, Nora Neutrvoom, an economist at ABN Amro told Euronews that the "Turkish economy will face a severe slowdown."

Turkey has long been vying for full EU membership. Last month, Erdogan said getting a fully fledged membership was a "strategic goal" for Turkey. But that looks unlikely after widespread criticism following the mass arrests and crack down on civil rights since the aborted coup of July 2016.

Note EU-Digest: Unfortunately no one in his right mind believes that these election results represent an accurate reflection of the facts . 

It is nearly impossible, as was reported by the government controlled media, that 59 million votes were counted by hand in only a little over three hours. 

Another first for Turkey was that Erdogan announced he had won, before the official Turkish election board did.

Erdogan called this election, which in reality was a total scam, a "celebration of Democracy", regardless of the fact that he had shut-down all the opposition's access to the media.

In this context, one should also not forget that Turkey presently has more journalists in prison than any other country in the world. 

Bottom line: Erdogan can now rule Turkey without opposition  as Turkey's economy slowly disintegrates.

EU-Digest

Tax Havens: EU blacklist of tax havens is a sham says EPSU

After months of screening some 90 jurisdictions and countries  in light of EC criteria of lack of transparency and harmful tax measures such as 0 or near 0 corporate tax rates, EU Finance Ministers have  agreed  a tiny  list of 17 countries: American Samoa, Bahrain, Barbados, Grenada, Guam, South Korea, Macau, Marshall Islands, Mongolia, Namibia, Palau, Panama, Saint Lucia, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia and United Arab Emirates are the countries listed, officials said.

The second list includes countries like EU candidates Turkey, Serbia and Montenegro, as well as Switzerland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Morocco, Thailand, Vietnam and Hong Kong.

It also includes entities that are considered as being among the main tax havens but which have promised to change their legislation: Bermuda, the Cayman Islands as well as UK-associated Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

Eight countries and territories recently hit by hurricanes - Antigua and Barbuda, Anguilla, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis, Turks and Caicos, US Virgin Islands - were given a grace period until February to come up with commitments.

The list excludes the most active harmful tax countries or jurisdictions including Benelux, Ireland, Malta, Cyprus, Switzerland, British channel islands,  US Delaware, Singapore or  Hong-Kong. Even Bermuda, that hosts the Paradise’s offshore services firm Appleby, did not make it to the list.

Jan Willem Goudriaan, General Secretary of EPSU, said “This tax havens list is a big sham. EU Finance Ministers have failed to agree a  coherent and transparent blacklist with deterring sanctions to make it effective. Coupled with the cuts in corporate taxes in many EU countries, today’s decision means that tax competition in and outside Europe will continue to run the show at the expense of workers’ wages and quality public services. 

It also means that trade unions, NGOs, investigative journalists and whistleblowers will need to  continue to do the transparency job that governments are not willing to do.”

Nick Crook, head of international for the UK's largest public services trade union UNISON said: “It’s disappointing that this list fails to name some of the world’s biggest tax haven offenders. The international community needs to do much more to tackle tax avoidance, and offshore tax scams that are happening on a grand scale. The richest individuals in our society should be making the biggest contribution to our public services –  not hiding money abroad, and shirking their obligations”

On the international scene, as tax rules for the digital economy are being discussed, this list is a sign that the  EU is losing its credibility on fair tax.

EPSU is the European Federation of Public Service Unions. It is the largest federation of the ETUC and comprises 8 million public service workers from over 260 trade unions; EPSU organises workers in the energy, water and waste sectors, health and social services and local, regional and central government, in all European countries including the EU’s Eastern Neighborhood. EPSU is the recognized regional organization of Public Services International (PSI). For more information please go to: http://www.epsu.org

EU-Digest

Lotteries: are they a hidden "scam" to make the lower income earners pay more tax?

The world lottery news reports that in the the first half of the year global lottery sales were up nearly 5% world-wide after a sluggish start with Latin American, Asia Pacific, and North American markets performing strongly in the second quarter.

Latin America showed a increase in sales of 24.6% for the first six months of 2013. Argentina’s Lotería Nacional Sociedad reported an increase in sales of 31% for the period January–June 2013 and Brazil’s Caixa Econômica Federal also enjoyed healthy sales growth, reporting an increase in sales of 12.5% for the first half of 2013.

The Asia Pacific region witnessed an increase in sales of 11.1% for H1 2013 over H1 2012, including the China Sports lottery increased by CNY 10.54 billion and the Chinese Welfare lottery increased by CNY 10.11 billion for the first six months of 2013.

European lotteries witnessed a relative decrease in sales of 1.7% but was still up a small percentage against the same time frame in 2012.

In the North American market, an increase of 9.4% on sales for the second quarter of 2013 was reported. 

The North American lottery system is a $70 billion-a-year business, an industry bigger than movie tickets, music, and porn combined. These tickets have a grand history: Lotteries were used to fund the American colonies and helped bankroll the young nation. In the 18th and 19th centuries, lotteries funded the expansion of Harvard and Yale and allowed the construction of railroads across the continent.

Since 1964, when New Hampshire introduced the first modern state lottery, governments have come to rely on gaming revenue. (Forty-three states and every Canadian province currently run lotteries.) In some states, the lottery accounts for more than 5 percent of education funding.

While approximately half of Americans buy at least one lottery ticket at some point, the vast majority of tickets are purchased by about 20 percent of the population. These high-frequency players tend to be poor and uneducated, which is why critics refer to lotteries as a regressive tax. (In a 2006 survey, 30 percent of people without a high school degree said that playing the lottery was a wealth-building strategy.) On average, households that make less than $12,400 a year spend 5 percent of their income on lotteries—a source of hope for just a few bucks a throw.

A 2008 Carnegie Mellon study found that "lotteries set off a vicious cycle that not only exploits low-income individuals' desires to escape poverty but also directly prevents them from improving upon their financial situations." As the study's lead author said: "The hope of getting out of poverty encourages people to continue to buy tickets, even though their chances of stumbling upon a life-changing windfall are nearly impossibly slim and buying lottery tickets in fact exacerbates the very poverty that purchasers are hoping to escape." (For what it's worth, the odds of winning the latest Powerball drawing were about one in 175 million.) A Duke University study found that the poorest third of households purchase more than half of the lottery tickets sold during a given week.

So let's acknowledge the lottery for what it is: a tax on those who can least afford it that is levied by preying on the very fact that they can't afford to buy the things they need. Sure, buying lottery tickets can be fun in the short term, but in the long run, lotteries are a truly cynical way for states to raise money.

As to the operational mechanics of lottery systems - investigators probably would have a field day looking into these structures. It is obvious that the super-computers which run these lotteries can easily be manipulated.

EU-Digest