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24 February 2012 Last updated at 04:24 ET

India's Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi has refused to furnish details of her income tax, citing "security" concerns, officials say.

An activist, V Gopalkrishnan, had requested the information under freedom of information legislation.

But in her reply, Mrs Gandhi said releasing the information might cause a "financial and security risk".

Mr Gopalkrishnan denied charges of any political affiliation and said he will continue his efforts.

In his query filed to the tax department last December, Mr Gopalkrishnan had sought details of Mrs Gandhi's income tax for the last 10 years, beginning in 2000.

This was done under the country's Right to Information legislation.

But his request was turned down.

He appealed and the income tax department was asked to send a notice to Mrs Gandhi requesting the information.

In her reply to the department, Mrs Gandhi said the disclosure of "such private information to third parties… in guise of transparency in public life would amount to unwarranted invasion of the individual's privacy".

She continued: "There is no case of bona fide public interest involved to disclose such information to third parties."

The tax department said the information sought had "no overriding public interest" and closed the request.

V Gopalkrishnan has the right to appeal.

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Sonia Gandhi rejects tax query

A TV documentary has revealed the extent to which expats in Spain are struggling during the eurozone crisis, with social services and local charities overwhelmed with demand for help

Andrew Sinclair, the BBC political correspondent for East Anglia, spoke to expats living on the Costa Blanca for BBC One's Sunday Politics show, and found that locals are struggling to cope in the recession, due to the pound's depressed value against the euro.

“It struck me there has been a lot of reporting in the UK about the impact ongoing euro crisis is having on holiday businesses and British businesses in general,” Mr Sinclair said. “We have found there is some real hardship out there.”

He told Roundtown News, a local freesheet newspaper, that expats were keen to point out they were not “stinking rich”, a common misconception of Brits living in Spain.

"A lot of people we spoke to were very much working class they didn’t have large fortunes to bring to Spain but felt they could do better for themselves than just living on a council estate," Mr Sinclair said.

While the continued eurozone crisis raises the possibility of an expat exodus from certain areas of Spain, many Brits plan to stay in the area. Property sales are sluggish, as a glut of new build properties in some areas is keeping demand and prices low, while others are unable to return for health reasons. Many are determined to stick it out and hope for an improvement in the economic situation, rather than trade Spanish sunshine for a return to the UK.

"The overall feeling is everyone is having to tighten their belts, mainly because Spain has long ceased to be a cheap place to live," said Jack Troughton of Roundtown News. "Utilities (Santiago: UTILITIES.SN - news) , particularly electricity and gas, continue to rise while extra tax has been put on petrol and diesel, the price already rising because of the fall in the value of the euro."

Some people with money in Spanish banks have started to repatriate their money while younger expats are looking for cash-in-hand work to bridge the gap. Older Britons are relying on an over-stretched social services or charity handouts.

"The British community is doing wonderful work through charities and the charity shops that are found along the whole of the coast," Mr Troughton said. "These help not only British expats but immigrants from across Europe (Chicago Options: ^REURUSD - news) and Latin America who hoped to build a new life here.

"The British consulates are also actively campaigning to help integrate expats and ensure they have access to the town hall facilities and social services they are entitled to receive."

The Sunday Politics Show East is on BBC One, Sundays from 11am.

See the article here:
Financial hardship taking its toll on Britons in Spain

Kuwaitis and Syrians protest the Syrian bloodshed February 4 outside the Syrian embassy in Kuwait City.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Syrian expatriates across the world are uniting against the regime of Bashar al-Assad Their mission is cutting across ethnic and religious lines Many Syrians are raising money in the U.S. and speaking about the crisis

(CNN) -- It has been five years since Mohammad Z. left Syria to train as a doctor in Detroit.

He works long hours. He's big on hockey. He's devoted to the Red Wings.

He's immersed in America, yet his heart is with Syria and the Syrian people.

It's hell inside Syria. But for Mohammed and other Syrian expatriates who want to end the regime of Bashar al-Assad, this is a kind of golden moment. Ethnic and religious and political divisions are melting away to serve one shimmering goal.

"I can't tell you how many wonderful Syrians I have met here who've devoted their money and time to see a democratic, free Syria," said Mohammed, whose last name is being withheld by CNN to protect his brother and parents in Syria. "You see the Christians, the Muslims, the nonreligious people; you see people from different ethnic backgrounds: Arabic, Assyrian and Kurds."

An underground newspaper in Syria recently published an essay of Mohammad's. In it, he wrote, "The revolution has brought us together, and we had scattered in loneliness."

For Mohammad and many other Syrian expatriates, there is no going back to the old Syria. For them, Syria has to change.

"These are people who've been exposed to the American culture and brought up in an environment -- even in Syria -- where there was Internet and dishes and satellites and they can see how the rest of the world lives," said Naser Danan, a Cleveland-based doctor with the Syrian Expatriates Organization.

While the expat group has members in other Arab countries and in Europe, Danan estimated that a majority of the 600 or so members are young doctors in the United States -- ironic, because al-Assad himself has a medical degree.

The group supports an end to al-Assad's regime, though it doesn't act as a political opposition entity. Members raise money to buy food and medicine for Syrians caught in the violence, and they speak in public about what's going on in Syria.

Cancer researcher Hazem Hallak recently spoke to a group of high-school students in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. When one of the students asked how he reacts to the latest videos coming out of Syria, Hallak said he doesn't watch anymore.

He explained why by describing the last video he watched from Syria. Someone recorded Syrian soldiers invading a house looking for the husband of the household. When they didn't find him, Hallak said, they cut off the head of his young son, hung it in the doorway and told his wife, "This is what will happen to your husband if he doesn't turn himself in."

The revolution has brought us together, and we had scattered in loneliness.
Syrian expatriate Mohammed Z.

Last May, Hallak's brother, a doctor in Syria, was arrested and killed -- his body mutilated -- after he returned from a trip to the United States.

A few expatriates in the United States are part of the Syrian National Council, the group that many Syrians consider to be the official political opposition.

One of them is George Netto, a cancer specialist who teaches and practices at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Netto, who is Christian by birth, said he joined the opposition group "to show it's really the entire spectrum of the Syrian people fighting the regime: Christian, Sunnis, poor, rich, educated and noneducated ... we wanted to burst that bubble they're trying to depict that it's only armed radicals or armed gangs."

In Detroit, Mohammad said he was going to anti-al-Assad rallies even before the Syrian secret police, the Mukhabarhat, arrested his brother who was protesting in Syria.

Mohammad said the police kept his brother locked up for three months. He said they interrogated him and tortured him from day one. (Listen to Mohammed read his brother's essay about that time)

After three months, the police let Mohammed's brother go to make room for a wave of new prisoners. But as soon as he was freed, he returned to protesting.

Mohammad said he would not tell his brother to stop protesting. If he were in Syria now, he said, he would do the same thing.

"This is not only an uprising," he said. "It's an epic, a human epic that's being written by the Syrian people."

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Expats uniting for common cause

Stephen Brashear/Getty Images

Boeing employees work on a plane engine at the company's factory in Everett, Wash. The Obama administration's corporate tax cut proposal would offer even deeper cuts for U.S. manufacturers like Boeing.

President Obama's plan to overhaul the nation's corporate tax system would sharply cut the taxes that U.S. companies pay. But it would also eliminate many of the loopholes that help them pare down what they owe.

White House spokesman Jay Carney says the proposal unveiled Wednesday should appeal to both Democrats and Republicans, by doing what both sides "say is important to do ... which is lower the rate, broaden the base [and] eliminate the underbrush of unnecessary subsidies and loopholes and special provisions that complicate the tax code."

But one phrase in Carney's statement reveals why the plan faces an uphill battle in Congress. "Broaden the base" means making more income, from more people, subject to taxation. And business lobbyists know that means eliminating popular tax breaks.

At least on paper, U.S. companies pay a tax rate of 35 percent — higher than almost any other advanced country. Tax Foundation President Scott Hodge says that rate leaves U.S. corporations at a big disadvantage.

"Seventy-five countries have cut their corporate tax rates. And if we look at the rest of the world, it's a very competitive place compared to the United States," Hodge says.

A Tax Code Loaded With Exemptions

But the U.S. tax code is also loaded with exemptions, deductions and credits of all kinds. And, says Bob McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice, most big companies know how to take advantage of them. "Right now we have about a 35 percent nominal corporate tax rate," he says. "But our big corporations, on average, pay about half that — about 18 percent."

The Obama administration's plan would cut the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, but it would also get rid of a lot of those loopholes. The plan would also impose a minimum tax on money that companies make overseas, something proponents say would cut down on the use of offshore tax havens.

Administration officials say a simpler tax code would save a lot of companies money. Joel Slemrod, professor of economics at the University of Michigan, agrees.

"Companies spend an enormous amount of money not just complying with the tax system, but planning ... how to make use of these complexities and the differences in tax systems across countries to their best advantage," he says.

To Hodge of the Tax Foundation, which lobbies for lower taxes, the effort to reform the system has come none too soon. "The administration should be given some credit for recognizing that the U.S. corporate tax rate is well out of step with the rest of the world and needs reform," he says.

But Hodge says the proposed tax cut doesn't go far enough. He also takes issue with a portion of the proposal that would cut the tax rate even further for manufacturers. Administration officials say they want to promote the creation of manufacturing jobs because they offer better pay and tend to lead to other kinds of job creation.

Picking Winners And Losers

But conservatives say the proposed boost to the manufacturing sector amounts to the government, rather than the market, picking winners and losers. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned that it would vigorously oppose efforts to pit one industry against another.

The idea is opposed by some liberal groups, as well. McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice notes that manufacturers already get big tax breaks.

"You take a company like Boeing, for example. ... Boeing hasn't paid a nickel in federal income taxes over the last 10 years. I don't know how you can cut their taxes any further. You really ought to be raising them," McIntyre says.

Such a move is unlikely to get through Congress in any case, particularly in an election year. Slemrod says hacking away at the thicket of tax credits and exemptions tends to be a tough sell in Washington — and lawmakers who try it quickly back down.

"In the past, anyway, the companies that pay more scream louder than the companies that pay less applaud," he says.

Still, there is widespread agreement that the tax code, with all its complexities and inequities, must be overhauled at some point — and that doing so would benefit the economy in the long run. The administration's proposal could set the stage for just such reform later on.

See more here:
Obama's Corporate Tax Cut Plan Faces Uphill Battle

Yesterday, President Obama announced a long-awaited proposal to cut corporate taxes in America, which U.S. businesses complain are much too high by international standards. The proposed reform is intended to prevent companies from shifting operations and earnings to tax havens (paging Mitt Romney!) and instead encourage companies to bring them back into the U.S., where they could create jobs and growth.

What’s being missed in all this is that the corporate tax debate and the jobs debate are two separate things. Here’s why.

America has the second highest corporate tax rate in the rich world. But most American businesses don’t pay it. The President is suggesting that the corporate tax rate drop from 35% to 28%. But as my colleague Fareed Zakaria wrote a few months back in Time, few of the biggest U.S. businesses are paying that rate right now; indeed, most are paying much less – 115 of the companies in the S & P 500 paid less than 20% in tax over the last five years. And 39 firms paid less than 10%.

(MORE: The Corporate Tax Rate Is Lowest in Decades; Is Business Paying Its Fair Share?)

That gets at the key issue: Fundamentally, lower taxes aren’t the reason that businesses choose to invest, or not, in a certain country. As Warren Buffett told me when I interviewed him late last year, “The idea that American business is at a big disadvantage against the rest of the world because of corporate taxes is baloney in my view. In the 50s and 60s, corporate taxes were 52%, and we were making all kinds of [job] gains.”

True enough. In fact, you can see more and more evidence for the fact that business doesn’t locate in a particular country just because it’s cheaper to do so. Consider the recently released Harvard Business School study looking at insourcing and outsourcing decisions among 10,000 alumnae who are running American businesses. The key reason for outsourcing wasn’t labor cost, but a combination of cost, proximity to market, and (most importantly) better worker skill sets abroad. In order for America to create jobs at home, we need to do the heavy lifting to reform education and develop workers who can do the sort of jobs businesses need them to do. (On that score, I applaud the way the President is trying to link educational reform with the bolstering of American manufacturing.)

(MORE: The Street Fighter: This Man is Busting Wall St.)

This goes to the final point, which is why companies are holding such a huge wad of foreign profits abroad to begin with – $1.5 trillion by some estimates. You can make a case that they simply don’t want to be taxed at 35%. But there’s no reason to think that under our current complicated tax structure, they couldn’t find ways around that, as they do with U.S. earnings.

Even more to the point: As Buffett says, nobody ever stopped investing because of high taxes. Companies stop investing because they don’t fundamentally believe in the growth opportunities in a market. I agree with Buffett that you can’t allow U.S. firms to repatriate foreign profits tax-free; it creates moral hazard. But it would be interesting to see how much of that money would flow back into the U.S. if the rate was 20%, or 12.5%, as it is in Ireland. It would tell us a lot, not only about corporate America’s belief (or lack thereof) in shared sacrifice, but also about their belief (or lack thereof) in the U.S. economy.

See the article here:
Obama's 28% Plan: Why Corporate Tax Cuts Won't Create More Jobs