The days when multinational companies could exploit fiscal loopholes to escape tax could soon be numbered, after governments gave the OECD strong backing to design an international clampdown on corporate tax avoidance. Ministers from Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and other countries backed OECD efforts on Thursday to press ahead with new guidelines to ensure firms are not able to pay little or no tax due to differences between tax regimes. The Group of 20 economic powers have asked the OECD to deliver an action plan at a July meeting of G20 finance ministers in Moscow. Corporate tax has climbed up the political agenda after news reports highlighting how multinationals reduce their tax bills struck a nerve with voters themselves increasingly pinched by higher taxes. Many existing taxation rules were drafted in the colonial era of the 1920s and are ill-adapted to the new reality of cross-border online commerce. The head of the OECD's tax division, Pascal
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