Paul Martin & Companies: Sixty Theses on the Alegal Nature of Tax Havens

Reviewed by Stephen Osborne

When Paul Martin was prime minister, and before that finance minister, he was seen and known to be a politician rather than a private operator in the higher echelons of global capital; indeed, his business persona cast only the faintest of shadows. Alain Deneault, in the sixty numbered paragraphs that comprise Paul Martin & Companies: Sixty Theses on the Alegal Nature of Tax Havens, translated by Rhonda Mullins (Talonbooks), demonstrates the enormous depth and great reach of that shadow person. Here we glimpse low wages and ecological disaster, heroin smuggling and oil wells and money laundering, little wars and big ones, famines in Liberiaall of which equate to a return on investment, tax-free. From the network of tax havens that Paul Martin Inc. exploits so well has emerged the uberclass of freebooting robber barons of the twenty-first century. This is a philosopher’s book, written in the European tradition of belles lettres that has never taken root in English Canada. It stands as an example and a rebuke to the watery discourse that passes for “political” commentary in the anglophone press, and it may be the only book about world economics prefaced with a sentence by Thomas Bernhard: “You think you’re visiting a beautiful country, but in reality you’re visiting a monstrous business enterprise.”