Well welcome back and indeed I hope your 2013 is as good as I plan mine to be! I think the great thing about Christmastime is that everyone else is off so you don't come back to lots of emails and messages.
Social media and Business shuts down too - I think this year more than most because things have been so tough, everyone needed the break from it. Equally of course, there was little point in staying open given the general lack of activity.
So although I was keeping an eye, not a lot happened during the break you can be assured....although the march over The Fiscal Cliff in the USA, is pretty scary in itself.
One of the more major issues that I blogged many times towards the end of 2012 was the tax avoidance issue and where Ireland now facilitates widespread European tax avoidance.
The Google Story is here http://streamabout.blogspot.ie/2012/12/the-tax-controversy-continues-now.html.
Microsoft's shameful governance and use of Luxembourg and Ireland's help in doing it is here http://streamabout.blogspot.ie/2012/12/starbucks-try-to-sort-it-microsoft-now.html
Starbucks story here http://streamabout.blogspot.ie/2012/12/starbucks-are-we-seeing-death-of-brand.html
US senate view of Ireland as a tax haven along with Costa Rica/Belize is here
http://streamabout.blogspot.ie/2012/12/now-dropbox-comes-to-dublin-for-greatly.html
Amazon, WPP and others appalling tax behaviour is here http://streamabout.blogspot.ie/2012/12/starbucks-amazon-google-microsoft-wpp.html
In particular, Ireland has become Europe's "biggest tax haven" in the view of the US Government no less and gets mentioned in the same breath as Costa Rica and Belize. Imagine.
Although this tax avoidance controversy was sparked by the poor corporate behaviour of Starbucks, it quickly extended to Facebook, Amazon, Dropbox, LinkedIn and most notably Google with most having their European HQ in Dublin - largely to facilitate the tax avoidance through the infamous "transfer pricing". It's a story that is so bad it's not going away any day soon and I did wonder if the bad publicity would reflect on the brands themselves.
And it has.
Clearly it has nearly destroyed Starbucks and no bad thing either. They behaved badly in doing what they did but worse following a "faux" PR attempt to make amends by offering to pay tax. And in doing so, cut into their staff incomes to achieve it. A company that's being exposed for what it really is rather than what we thought it was.
Google has also come out thus far, as being pretty poor too and therefore I was interested to see the annual 'Brandindex Table' by YouGov in the UK which asks 2,000 different people a day about good/bad things about brands, that Google has itself fallen off a brand cliff. Google have dropped out of the top 10 altogether. It has dropped from a 26.7 rating to 11.7 which is about as dramatic it can be in the short time and largely, according to BrandIndex, because of the tax issue.
Another avoider to also feel the wrath on the same issue is Amazon.
Amazon dropped from first to third - 32.1 rating down to 24.1 and again it's been late to the controversy so it will suffer more.
Here is the Top 10-
The top brand was The BBC Iplayer (remember this is a UK survey); John Lewis (big Department store with terrific advertising); Amazon; Money Saving expert; Marks & Spencer; Ipad/Apple; Sainsburys (retail grocery); BBC.co.uk; Samsung and lastly, Cathedral City (a cheese I think).
So there's no doubt, brands that have been involved (and there's a lot) in this tax avoidance 2012 issue, will see damage in 2013 unless they put it right. However, countries that are associated with it and that actually contribute to it, will feel the damage too.
Most notably those countries that terrorise their citizens into paying tax and at the same duplicitous time, help large corporates shamefully avoid it.
Ireland beware.
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