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New Delhi, March 30: The government will not go after P-note holders but can tax foreign institutional investors (FIIs) issuing promissory notes in case they are not genuine residents of tax-free havens.

However banks and FIIs with actual operations in tax-free havens will be allowed to operate in the stock markets without attracting taxes.

Indian tax authorities would examine the tax liability of the said financial institutional investors. However, the tax authorities would not go beyond the FIIs to check any further detail about the participatory notes holders, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee clarified here today.

Accordingly, the question of liability for tax in India of participatory note (P-note) holders would not arise.

The statement came after a week of market turbulence with stock market punters reacting negatively to new tax provisions which sought to impose taxes on investors who routed money through shell firms in tax havens.

Finance ministry officials said they wanted to allay fears of P-note holders who have as much as $20 billion of Indian stock assets in their portfolios. Many investors who want to invest in the Indian stock market or who wish to play without the bother of registering themselves with Sebi use these participatory notes which are certificates with underlying Indian shares. Its estimated that FIIs have invested about 10 per cent of their approximately Rs 10,00,000-crore portfolio in India through P-notes.

Mukherjees statement is being read to mean that the government will not try to check on the persons who hold the P-notes. We are not out to uncover the seven veils of P-note holders, provided the bank or FI certifies that know your customer norms have been followed, said a top revenue official.

The 30-share Sensex ended up 312 points at 17370 and the 50-share Nifty ended up 103 points at 5282 after this announcement. However, independent tax consultant Sudatto Sen said FIIs remained liable to taxation on earnings from P-notes, unless they could prove genuine residence in tax havens.

Top finance ministry officials agreed on this analysis but pointed out that most FIIs playing in India were actually operating out of tax free jurisdictions such as Singapore, Mauritius and Luxembourg.

Taxes will be due from persons or firms who are operating through shells in tax havens, say from a lawyers office or from an address where twenty firms are registered in one single small flat! any sane person will agree these are shady operations and need to be investigated and taxed, they said.

Read this article:
Pranab puts P-note worry to rest

By Lynnley Browning

(Reuters) - The case of a wealthy U.S. businessman who pleaded guilty to evading taxes but then sued the Swiss bank where he hid his money is scheduled to go to trial on May 8, the first major test of civil legal challenges to Swiss banks that sold offshore private banking services to help Americans evade taxes.

The civil suit, filed against UBS AG in federal court in Santa Ana, California - and another filed against UBS in federal court in Chicago - will probe whether clients can legally rely on their private bankers' assertions there is no need to disclose the accounts on their tax returns or sign required disclosures.

Tax lawyers describe the suits, emerging from a crackdown by federal authorities on Swiss banks, as the first of their kind in the United States to assert that Swiss bankers made improper assertions to their U.S. clients about the tax implications of their offshore accounts.

In the California case filed in 2008, Russia-born American billionaire Igor Olenicoff accuses UBS of fraud in handling some $200 million he kept in offshore accounts and wrongfully advising him he did not have to report them to the tax-collecting IRS. Olenicoff pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 2007 and to lying on his tax returns by failing to disclose his offshore accounts, and paid $52 million in back taxes. His suit seeks $500 million in damages.

The Chicago case, which seeks class-action status, was filed in June 2011 on behalf of former UBS clients Matthew Thomas of California and Himanshu Patel of Arizona. Thomas and Patel previously paid back taxes, interest and penalties to the IRS related to their Swiss accounts. They accuse UBS of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty for allegedly telling them that their accounts, opened when the two worked overseas during the last two decades, did not have to be disclosed to the IRS.

UBS argues in both cases that its clients have a duty to know what to declare on their U.S. tax returns. A UBS spokeswoman in New York, Karina Byrne, declined to comment specifically on the lawsuits, but said the bank "does not give any tax advice to our clients, and we encourage clients to seek third-party tax advice."

U.S. INVESTIGATION UNDER WAY

The two cases are unfolding at a time when U.S. authorities are conducting a major investigation into the Swiss banking industry. The U.S. Justice Department has indicted one Swiss private bank, Wegelin, and charged scores of Swiss bankers and their American clients with tax evasion.

In 2009, UBS averted indictment and paid a $780 million fine to the U.S. Justice Department as part of a deferred-prosecution agreement in which it admitted to fraud and conspiracy in helping about 19,000 wealthy Americans hide up to $20 billion in secret bank accounts.

Read the original post:
Lawsuits test UBS advice on offshore bank accounts

During the heyday of the tech bubble in the late 1990s, day traders made easy money buying and selling Internet stocks. It didn't take much skill to succeed in those days. In just a 17-month period, from October 1998 to March 2000, the Nasdaq Composite Index skyrocketed from roughly 1,344 to an all-time high of around 5,132. All you had to do was ride that tidal wave to rake in the profits. Many of those traders made just as much shorting the index on its way down to a low of about 1,108 in October 2002, losing 78% of its value in 31 months.

Once the bubble had fully deflated, the easy money dried up. Many of those who had profited through good luck and timing left trading and looked for other work. They discovered that day trading, like any other profession, requires education and skills to consistently make a living. For more information, see Day Trading: An Introduction.

BasicsA pure day trader buys and sells stocks or other investments and ends the trading day in cash with no open positions. If a position is held overnight or for several days, it's called a swing trade. Most day traders use both approaches, depending on their trading style and the nature of their investments.

Day trading requires a professional software platform and a high-speed Internet connection. While it's possible to design and build your own trading platform, most traders use a prepackaged setup provided by their brokerage or a specialized software company. It's best to have a powerful desktop with at least two monitors, and preferably four to six. You need multiple screens to display the charts and technical indicators that will provide your buy and sell signals.

When you use a brokerage platform, ensure that real-time news and data feeds are included in the package. You'll need that data to construct charts that expose trends and portray the time frames and trading strategies you want.

Technical IndicatorsFamiliarity with stocks and market fundamentals isn't enough to succeed as a trader. You should understand technical analysis and all of the tools used to dissect chart patterns, trading volume and price movements. Some of the more common indicators are resistance and support levels, moving average convergence/divergence (MACD), volatility, price oscillators and Bollinger Bands.

Learning and understanding how these indicators work only scratches the surface of what you'll need to know to develop your personal trading style. Hundreds of books have been written about day trading, and you can also take classes online or in person.

StrategiesTrading requires sufficient capital to take advantage of leveraging fairly large positions. Most traders make their money on relatively small price movements in liquid stocks or indexes with mid to high volatility. You need price movement to make money, either long or short. Higher volatility implies higher risk, with the potential for greater rewards and losses.

Unless you can buy several hundred or more shares of a stock, you won't make enough money on trades to cover the commissions. The lower the price of the stock, the more shares you'll need to gain sufficient leverage and total price movement.

The key to successful trading is developing techniques to determine entry and exit points. Most traders develop a style that they stick with, once they are comfortable with it. Some only trade one or two stocks every day, while others trade a small basket of favorites. The advantage of trading only a few stocks is that you learn how they act under different conditions and how movement is affected by the key market makers.

Excerpt from:
How To Become A Day Trader

Following its failure to separate its DVD and streaming businesses with its loud and unpopularQwiksterrebranding effort, Netflix has taken subtler tactics to segregate its two types of customers: buying up the domain DVD.com.

Domain Name Wire noticed the registration information had changed on the domain, and a spokespersonhas confirmed that Netflix indeed snatched up the URL. "Netflix cares about keeping DVD healthy, and this is just one small investment in keeping DVD healthy," a spokesperson told Domain Name Wire. From the looks of the name and the sounds of that comment, Netflix will do something DVD-related, possibly create a whole new site, with the URL.

Netflix hasn't commented on the specifics, giving TechCrunch's Ingrid Lunden an even vaguer comment: "In the U.S. we look to provide a great experience for our members, those who have DVD only, streaming only and those who have both." But, ever since Qwikster failed, Netflix has continued, in quieter ways, to push the two subscription models away from one another. The companymakes it pretty hard for anyone to sign up for DVD deliveryandit no longer lets DVD-only subscribers rate movies on the main Netflix page, pushing them to another site. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has made clear that the company has different strategies for streaming and DVD. "DVD will do whatever its going to do," he said at the UBS media conference. "Were going to try to not hurt it, but were not putting a lot of time and energy into doing anything particular around it." Buying a domain and relegating users to that site sounds like just the type of low energy plan Hastings wants.

Update 3:22 p.m.: A Netflix spokesman has denied that the company will offload its DVD subscribers onto that site, telling AllThingsD's Peter Kafka the company bought it for "defensive reasons."

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at rgreenfield at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.

Link:
Netflix Snaps Up DVD.com Domain

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Continued here:
How to Use The Phone Dot with TV Remotes. - Video