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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> it goes without saying that these companies and individuals are almost definitely solving for minimal tax rather than maximal "stability"

Why does it go without saying? Indian courts can take 10+ years to resolve simple disputes; Mauritian courts are much faster.

A portfolio of stocks and bonds held in a Mauritian entity costs a few tens of U.S. dollars of extra accounting costs to do taxes on a year; a portfolio in India held by a foreigner can easily cost hundreds of dollars for an American investor to comply with.

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> Why does it go without saying?

Mainly because their motivations for doing so (namely: tax avoidance) were spelled out by the companies and their accountants in a series of email leaks. That's the thread we're in right now.

Australia and Canada have DTAs with India too. Pretty stable countries by most people's reckoning, potentially moreso than Mauritius and both with solid legal systems. Yet we aren't seeing PwC recommend to Silicon Valley investment firms that they spin up Australian shell companies to facilitate Indian investment.

We could probably speculate as to why not, or we could look at what the companies and their accountants said in the aforementioned series of leaked emails.

It's tax avoidance. It's not illegal, but it's not simplification or stability.

@JumpCrisscross: "A portfolio of stocks and bonds held in a Mauritian entity costs a few tens of U.S. dollars of extra accounting costs to do taxes on a year; a portfolio in India held by a foreigner can easily cost hundreds of dollars for an American investor to comply with."

Yea, it's got nothing to do with extracting the maximum amount of revenue out of the host country whilst managing to avoid giving anything back in taxation :]

> whilst managing to avoid giving anything back in taxation

I’m comparing accounting costs. Both paid to the same offshore accountant. Indian tax codes are complicated and unpredictable. Mauritian ones are not. As an outsider, simplicity wins. (I’d gladly pay a higher foreign tax rate if it meant simpler paperwork.)

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