Avocado Roundup is a quick morning review of top tax, legal, and climate news stories. It’s written by humans.
- Big companies aren’t happy about new requirements for them to report more information about the income taxes they pay in their annual financial statements. The new rules, approved by the Financial Accounting Standards Board Wednesday, take effect in 2025 for public companies and 2026 for private companies. (WSJ)
- California’s attorney general says the state needs to reduce its taxation of the cannabis industry. (SFGate)
- China reduced its stamp duty on stock trading, the first such tax reduction in 15 years. (International Tax Review)
- Switzerland’s federal council launched a public consultation on a bill that would strengthen its overall anti-money-laundering framework, in a bid to polish the country’s attractiveness as a business and finance location. The bill would, among other things, create a non-public beneficial ownership database and beef up Switzerland’s due-diligence requirements for “particularly risky activities” in the legal professional. (The Federal Council)
- Swarovski announced that corporate lawyer Stephan Mechnig will join the Austria-headquartered crystal and gemstone company as chief legal and compliance officer starting Oct. 1. He arrives after close to a decade at Luxembourg-based dairy group Theo Müller, where he was general counsel and chief compliance officer. A Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer attorney in Frankfurt early in his career, he has worked in-house at Nestle and Coca-Cola. (LinkedIn)
- Baker McKenzie tax partner Alex Pankratz moved to Canadian firm Fasken in Toronto. Also a chartered professional accountant, Pankratz focuses on international tax planning, M&A, reorganizations and financings. (Fasken.com)
- K&L Gates hired energy lawyer Theodore Paradise as partner in Boston. He arrives from Swedish wind energy company Hexicon, where he was chief legal and policy officer, North America. (KLGates.com)
