(Reuters) – Europe edged closer to lifting banking secrecy on Wednesday after Austria said it was ready to share data on foreign depositors but Vienna’s support could fade should efforts to strike a similar deal with Switzerland fail.

Austria’s dropping of objections allowed EU leaders to commit to an exchange of bank information between countries by the end of the year, as cash-strapped states seek to stop tax evasion and close loopholes highlighted by Apple Inc’s use of a base in Ireland.

“It’s a bad day for tax cheats,” Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann told reporters at a meeting of EU leaders to discuss fighting tax fraud by lifting bank secrecy.

“I believe we will manage the exchange of data by the end of the year,” he said, adding later that although he was watching negotiations on a similar deal with Switzerland, Austria was in “full agreement”.

Nearly all EU member states exchange information about which bank account holders receive which interest payments – an agreement known as the Savings Directive. Austria had not wanted to reveal the names of account holders to other countries and instead told banks to withhold tax.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the EU deal as an enormous step. “There is no doubt that the exchange of information about all kinds of income will be the rule for the future,” she told reporters.

But there are hurdles ahead. Faymann is certain to come under pressure from his outspoken finance minister, Maria Fekter, if Switzerland does not sign up to a similar code.

Luxembourg also underscored the importance of a deal first with Switzerland.

It had previously backed a pan-EU agreement on exchanging bank information but on Wednesday, its prime minister appeared to qualify this support.

“We would like that there are first negotiations with Switzerland,” Jean-Claude Juncker said, insisting, however, that this was not a precondition. “In light of these negotiations, we will, I hope, decide before the end of this year.”

ELECTION ISSUE

Most developed countries share information on taxpayers and depositors on demand. But since this requires the authorities in the requesting jurisdiction to suspect wrongdoing, it has only limited impact in uncovering unlawful behavior.

Automatic exchange of information makes it easier for tax authorities to spot tax evasion.

While it had publicly favored such a change, officials from Luxembourg have been privately rowing back.

Luxembourg does not want, for example, to back a revised version of the EU savings tax regime that would extend beyond simple interest payments on savings, little used to hide income, to include foundations and trusts.

The tiny but wealthy state has an important banking sector and a lot to lose. Nearby Switzerland is the globe’s biggest offshore centre, with $2 trillion of offshore assets.

Were its banks to be subject to laxer rules, they could attract funds from Luxembourg, whose offshore assets are one quarter of Switzerland’s.

In Austria, however, nowhere near as much offshore business is conducted. EU citizens other than Austrians have about 35 billion euros in deposits at the country’s banks, a tenth of the total deposits there, according to the central bank in Vienna.

As well as negotiating with Switzerland to bring it into the same regime as the EU’s 27 member states, the bloc will also negotiate with Liechtenstein, Monaco, Andorra and San Marino.

Momentum is gathering behind efforts to clamp down on tax evasion as Germany prepares for elections this year.

“The gap between rich and poor has widened dramatically in Germany in the past 10 years, making the issue of tax evasion an important one in the elections,” said Jacob Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics think-tank.( END)

list of political parties for July 28 general election. (nec)

Eight political parties which registered for July general election in Cambodia today obtained its ordinal number in ballots. The ceremony of recruiting the ordinal number was presided over by two Buddhist chiefs – Samdech Tep Vong, monk chief of Theravada and Samdech Boukry, monk chief of Thamayuth-nikay.

The general election for 5^th mandate will be held on July 28, 2013.

1. The Cambodian Nationality Party 
2. The Funcinpec party
3. The Democratic Nationality Party
4. The Cambodian People Party
5. The Khmer Economic Party Development party
6. The Khmer Anti-poverty Party
7. The Cambodian National Rescue party
8. The League for Democracy party

Cambodia plans to hold a general election for the 123 seat parliament on July 28, and some 9.67 million Cambodians are eligible to cast their ballots. currently, ruling party CPP led by Prime Minister Hun Sen had 90 of 123 seats, sam rainsy party of 26, human right party of 3, and Funcinpec party for 2 and Prince Narariddh party ( Nationalist party) of 2.

( END)

Syrian fighters

May 22 (Reuters) – The World Bank has proposed a $150 million loan for Jordan to help it with the cost of thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war in Syria, Jordanian and World Bank board sources said on Wednesday.

“The (World Bank) board should act on it in June,” one source told Reuters. “Pressure on Jordan is increasing and the loan should help ease the economic burden.”

Close to 500,000 Syrian refugees, out of a total of 1.5 million, have sought shelter in Jordan from an escalating civil war between forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and rebel fighters trying to overthrow him.

Jordan has sought to win more outside help in its struggle to cope with the vast influx of refugees from Syria. The World Bank loan could help bring further international assistance to Jordan.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was in Amman on Wednesday to pave the way for a U.S.-Russian proposed peace conference, possibly in Geneva next month, aimed at ending the two-year Syrian conflict.

The cost of accommodating the refugees has squeezed Jordan’s economy, which was hit by a financial crisis last year and forced the government to seek a $2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund.

Fighting in Syria has increased in recent months in a war that has already killed more than 80,000 people and drawn in Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and Iranian backers in a conflict spreading across borders.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim told Reuters in Geneva on Tuesday he was worried about the situation in the region and the poverty-fighting institution stood ready to help. The World Bank pledged $250 million to Jordan in January 2012 to help it cope with the economic downturn, but Jordan’s King Abdullah asked Kim for further assistance two weeks ago.

“With Jordan, they are the first ones who have come and just asked me directly for increased assistance and we’ve said yes,” Kim said.

While many of the Syrian refugees are in Jordan’s main Zaatri camp, many have taken refuge with Jordanian families or friends in towns close to the Syrian border, putting a strain on water, electricity and other local resources.

The United Nations has urged Jordan not to close its borders to the refugees.  ( END)

Syrians left their beloved country as refugees in neighboring countries. ( ap)

Representatives from Western and Arab nations in Jordan’s capital Amman have promised further support for the Syrian opposition.

Delegates of the “Friends of Syria” group released a statement after Wednesday’s talks. They expressed support for an international conference in Geneva to be organized in June by the United States and Russia.

They hope to bring President Bashar al-Assad’s administration and its opponents to the table in Geneva to seek a political solution.

The delegates also demanded immediate withdrawal of any Lebanese Hizbollah militants and Iranian troops from Syria.

Rebels have said Iranian and Hizbollah fighters have intervened in support of Assad.

But participants of the meeting were divided on how to support Syrian rebels, including whether to provide them with weapons. ( NHK)

Container ship

Tokyo: Japan’s trade balance in April posted a deficit for the 10th straight month.

The biggest factor is the higher costs of fuel imports as the yen continues to weaken. The Finance Ministry said the trade deficit came to about 880 billion yen, or 8.6 billion dollars. That’s the highest figure for the month of April since 1979, when comparative data became available.

Exports rose 3.8 percent from a year earlier in yen terms. That’s the second month they have risen. Exports to the US were nearly 15 percent higher, helped by solid auto shipments. Exports to China were slightly higher by 0.3 percent, reversing the downward trend in the previous 2 months. But exports to the EU extended their declines, and were down 3.5 percent.

Imports rose 9.4 percent…increasing for a 6th straight month. A major factor behind rising imports is the sharp increase in the yen cost for liquefied natural gas, stemming from the Japanese currency’s recent decline. ( NhK))

The money-news site The Billfold recently ran an interview with an anonymous physician who earns $570,000 a year and says, “I know that technically I am in the 1%, but I don’t feel rich at all.” He went on to explain how he owns a home worth nearly $1 million, three cars, a couple of investment properties, and a chunk of a profitable healthcare company yet still frets that he doesn’t have enough. “I don’t feel secure,” he said. “Before I had a job, the six-figure mark was a goal for everyone. And now I’ve hit the half-million dollar mark. I don’t know if I’d feel rich if I ever met the seven-figure mark.”

Commenters howled, of course, deriding the discontented doc’s self-indulgence and making many predictable observations about materialism run amok. “It’s emblematic of the insane level of lifestyle creep that allows someone who makes $500k+ a year to feel not rich,” wrote one reader, reflecting the sentiment of many others.

The anonymous doc, whom the site dubbed “Jake Smith,” acknowledged his own materialistic impulses. “There is a palpable pressure to keep up with the Joneses,” he said of the social demands in his affluent community, which is in the suburbs of a sizeable eastern city, according to Logan Sachon of The Billfold. Yet he also showed a degree of restraint, making do, for instance, with a 7-year-old Lexus when many of his neighbors drive brand-new Range Rovers. That doesn’t exactly generate sympathy but it shows more self-awareness than the wealthy — or caricatures of the wealthy — are typically known for.

The lengthy Q&A also reveals a few legitimate concerns about money, whether you have a lot or a little. Here are four reasons to cut some slack to wealthy worriers such as the $570,000 man, assuming he actually exists:

They take risks. “Jake Smith” invested in one business that flopped and lost “maybe a few hundred thousand dollars” in bad investments overall early in his career. Those losses wiped out his cash, he said, and left his family living paycheck to paycheck for a while. Yet he learned from those mistakes instead of retreating into a shell, and had the guts to invest in another business. That might sound easy to do when you read about it, but in reality it’s damn hard to risk your own money on an unproven venture — which is why most people never do. People who take risks earn higher returns for good reason.

They’ve been burned. A lot of wealthy people who earn their fortunes (instead of inheriting them) stumble along the way, and it’s often the ability to bounce back rather than some magic knack for making money that leads to their success. Smith describes feeling “scarred” by earlier setbacks, like many people who have survived difficulties. “There were people depending on me and I felt like I was letting them down,” he says. “I know it’s very easy to squander what you have.” Like Depression survivors who grew up to become misers, Smith might never be fully free from worry, even if he ends up with millions in the bank.

The soaring cost of college scares everybody. College tuition has been rising at 2 to 4 times the rate of inflation, making education a huge financial burden for many families. Smith has three kids, which could add up to $600,000 in college bills, at a rate of $50,000 per student per year for tuition, room and board. And it’s safe to assume a family in his income bracket won’t quality for financial aid.

Taxes on the rich are probably going higher. To his credit, Smith doesn’t whine about this, but his taxes went up considerably this year, since he’s above the cutoff for some of the “fiscal cliff” tax hikes meant to hit only the wealthy. Beyond that, the kinds of additional revenue-raising measures getting a serious look in Washington — such as eliminating mortgage-interest deductions for second or third homes and ending some investment tax credits — are designed to snare people exactly like Smith, while exempting most working people.

Rather than attacking Smith’s sense of entitlement, it might be worth reconsidering what it means to be rich in the first place. A lot of wannabe millionaires fantasize about a life in which they never have to worry about money at all. But that may be the very thing that leads to the gaudy behavior we find most appalling about the rich. A healthy dose of worry might help the wealthy remember how the other half lives, and even spend their money more like the 99 percent.

Rick Newman’s latest book is Rebounders: How Winners Pivot From Setback To Success.

During the first visit to the White House in 47 years by a leader of the Southeast Asian nation, Obama called for an end to the killings of Rohingya Muslims in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

Reformist Myanmar President Thein Sein vowed to resolve ethnic conflicts and bring perpetrators to justice.

“I also shared with President Sein our deep concern about communal violence that has been directed at Muslim communities inside Myanmar. The displacement of people, the violence directed towards them needs to stop,” Obama said.

At least 192 people died last year in violence between Buddhists in Rakhine and Rohingya Muslims, who are denied citizenship by Myanmar. Most of the victims, and the 140,000 people made homeless in the attacks, were Muslims.

As the Myanmar government eases repression, long-simmering ethnic tensions are on the boil – a dynamic that resembles what happened when multi-ethnic Yugoslavia fractured in the 1990s after communism fell.

Thein Sein appealed for U.S. “assistance and understanding” as Myanmar attempts difficult reforms.

Obama said the Myanmar leader had assured him that he intends to release more political prisoners and institutionalize political reforms that have already begun transforming the country and ending its estrangement from the West.

Rights groups and some U.S. lawmakers fear Obama has moved too quickly since forging a dramatic breakthrough in relations in 2011 after a half century of military rule in Myanmar.

U.S. officials argue that reforms by Myanmar – freeing democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi and hundreds of political prisoners, scrapping censorship, legalizing trade unions and protests – are transformative and deserve support from Obama, who confirmed the end of Myanmar’s pariah status with the West with a landmark visit last November.

“What has allowed this shift in relations is the leadership that President Sein has shown in moving Myanmar down a path of both political and economic reform,” Obama said in the Oval Office.

Even critics in Congress of Obama’s Myanmar policy support the U.S. strategic goal of bringing Myanmar, tucked between China and India, out of its isolation from the West.

The long U.S.-Myanmar estrangement was a drag on America’s relations with ASEAN, the 10-nation Southeast Asian regional grouping that looks to Washington as a counterbalance to the more assertive China of recent years.

‘MAXIMUM INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT’

In a speech after the White House meeting, Thein Sein described efforts to develop Southeast Asia’s poorest economy, overhaul decrepit institutions, undo the habits of decades of authoritarian rule and build a new, inclusive national identity from dozens of ethnic groups, some of which have been at war for decades.

“To achieve all this we need maximum international support, including from the United States, to train and educate, share knowledge, trade and invest, and encourage others to do the same,” he told an audience at a Washington university.

He referred to the Muslim killings and said his government “must ensure not only that inter-communal violence is brought to a halt, but that all the perpetrators are brought to justice.”

Thein Sein, a retired general, was taken off the U.S. Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals visa blacklist last year to facilitate engagement.

The slight, soft-spoken leader was a close confidante of former military ruler Than Shwe, who ran Myanmar for 19 years, a period that saw mass jailing of opponents, the gunning down of pro-democracy protesters and widespread abuses in ethnic minority areas.

Successive U.S. governments have refused to acknowledge the country’s change of name from Burma to Myanmar made in the late 1980s by the country’s military rulers.

The United States for years deliberately referred to the nation of 60 million people as Burma, so as not to give legitimacy to military governments.

But in a nod to political reforms, the White House acknowledged it is now employing the name Myanmar more often than before.

“We have responded by expanding our engagement with the government, easing a number of sanctions, and as a courtesy in appropriate settings, more frequently using the name Myanmar,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

In a new U.S. measure to support reform, the United States and Myanmar on Tuesday will sign a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement on boosting trade, labor standards and investment, the United States trade representative said.

U.S. business leaders support lifting sanctions more quickly to facilitate access to an undeveloped consumer market in a country rich in oil, natural gas, minerals and timber. Europe, Japan and other parts of Asia have few or no Myanmar sanctions.

“The immediate tasks at hand … are to remove the remaining U.S. economic sanctions on Myanmar, and to extend duty-free treatment in the United States for the imports of Myanmar,” said Bart Fisher, chairman of the new Myanmar-U.S. Trade Council. ( reuters)

The Pakistani military says it will strengthen its crackdown on the smuggling of chemical fertilizers to neighboring Afghanistan. The action is a response to requests from the US military.

The Taliban and other anti-government forces have repeatedly set off homemade roadside bombs targeting US troops stationed in Afghanistan. The US Defense Department estimates 70 percent of such bombs are made from fertilizer produced and sold in Pakistan. The bombs are often referred to as improvised explosive devices.

Representatives of the Pakistani and US militaries met in Islamabad on Monday to discuss the use of such homemade bombs.

Pakistani military officials acknowledged that ammonium nitrate fertilizer made in their country has been smuggled into Afghanistan and used to make such bombs.

They told the US military they will ban the use and transfer of such fertilizer in the country’s northwestern region which borders Afghanistan. They also said they’d increase the number of soldiers in border areas to improve monitoring.

Some members of the US Congress are calling for an end to economic aid to Pakistan until the country takes effective countermeasures against the smuggling problem.

The Pakistani military says it will strengthen its crackdown on the smuggling of chemical fertilizers to neighboring Afghanistan. The action is a response to requests from the US military.

The Taliban and other anti-government forces have repeatedly set off homemade roadside bombs targeting US troops stationed in Afghanistan. The US Defense Department estimates 70 percent of such bombs are made from fertilizer produced and sold in Pakistan. The bombs are often referred to as improvised explosive devices.

Representatives of the Pakistani and US militaries met in Islamabad on Monday to discuss the use of such homemade bombs.

Pakistani military officials acknowledged that ammonium nitrate fertilizer made in their country has been smuggled into Afghanistan and used to make such bombs.

They told the US military they will ban the use and transfer of such fertilizer in the country’s northwestern region which borders Afghanistan. They also said they’d increase the number of soldiers in border areas to improve monitoring.

Some members of the US Congress are calling for an end to economic aid to Pakistan until the country takes effective countermeasures against the smuggling problem. ( NHK)

A government taskforce made up of officials from relevant ministries, including transport and foreign, compiled an interim report on Monday.

They proposed measures like relaxing visa requirements for Southeast Asian tourists by the end of the year.

The task force suggested Japan introduce a new status to allow long-term stays for wealthy foreign tourists. Applicants will be subject to certain conditions regarding their income and assets.

The officials also proposed information be given in different languages at museums and other attractions.

Ministers plan to incorporate the recommendations in next month’s economic growth strategy.( NHK)