Westward Group Advisor: De aanpak van Buffett belastingen

Tocqueville Asset Management founder Francois Sicart warns that verbergenvan the taxman is meaningless, but deferral of taxes is profitable

You can not escape taxes, but you can benefit from the legal delaying their payment .

That is a model that legendary investor Warren Buffett is an example, and it is one of several broad lessons on how investors can profitably think about taxes that Tocqueville Asset Management founder Francois Sicart offer in a letter to shareholders.

Sicart sheds light on Buffett's tax practices - made all the more remarkable by the outspoken billionaire frequent advocating higher taxes on the rich - but not before urging investors to forsake no counterproductive tendency to escape tax.

The instinct for tax evasion has been well honed by vanoorlogen history, invasions and confiscation which long has conditioned people to teverbergen their wealth, "preferably in another country," writes Sicart.

Europeans in particular should not hide their wealth when roofzuchtigenazi or fear of a Soviet invasion, worry about the tax-grijpenplunderingen of the welfare state.

Such fears generated thriving global tax havens that were completely legal or at least tolerated.

Sicart the goal in writing about taxes is to advise the new rich diezou can think in terms of tax avoidance that resistance is futile taxes today.

The founder of the company or fund - which is managing money since 1969 -first valued fiscal landscape changing dynamics in 1981 when IBM introduced its personal computer.

"It occurred to me that the risk had shifted and banking secrecy was doomed," writes Sicart of the PC's large databases, which give way very soon for massaleinformatieverwerking of today's Internet era would.

The other major change came in 1989, when the member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) formally began sharing vanfinanciële data as a means of combating money laundering and co- financing of terror - cooperation that ultimately led to "multilateral and bilateral tax practical banking secrecy have been eliminated in most countries, "he writes.

So, the recent past which was hiding wealth or not a crime or eengetolereerd act that was difficult in any case to discover through existing technological resources, rich investors today have to deal with from hetfeit that hide from the taxman is now impossible.