There is one big secret to tax dodging: it is to think that you are doing the right thing.

Sure, there are technicalities that need sorted; setting up a company in Belize and opening a bank account in Gibraltar or finding an accountant to help you pretend you earn less than you do.

But before you get to that, you have to convince yourself that avoiding – even illegally evading – tax is moral. And, this, for many of the world's great dodgers, is much easier than it sounds. Why? Because it is relatively unproblematic to think of a tax-hungry state as being evil if the government in question is a mess somewhere in the developing world.

Take the Philippines. Yesterday The Herald revealed whisky firm Whyte & Mackay is owned in a notorious tax haven, the secretive British Virgin Islands.

Ultimately the company is the property of a Filipino tycoon called Andrew Han, who has been named in Panama Papers, that giant dump of documents earlier this year which revealed industrial scale use of tax havens. Whyte & Mackay had no comment on why they were owned in this way.

Whyte & Mackay brands

The Herald:

But I was struck by the sheer scale of other Filipinos named in the Panama Papers: more than 570.

Moreover, the Philippines is far from the only developing economy with a rich class who bank their assets far from their taxman. Oxfam, the charity, sees tax avoidances by the rich in the Third World as a major hurdle to development. Its researchers reckon the super-rich have squirrelled away $7.6 trillion offshore, denying some $190 billion in tax a year. Corporations, the charity calculated, have used tax havens to avoid paying nearly as much again in corporation tax. Its solution: shut down tax havens, some, such as the UK-run BVI, are well within the control of western governments.

Some Third World business people fear local Byzantine tax systems will just chew them up, including imposing double taxation on overseas income. Such wealth holders don't just see bureaucracies in their home countries as wasteful, corrupt or inefficient: they see them as a potential threat. They are going to want to find a safe haven for their money. And that might turn out to the UK.

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This is certainly the case in the former Soviet Union. I know business people there who live with a genuine angst that the government could seize their assets, or that what they see as a inept or "buyable" court system will allow somebody else do do so.

This, I guess, is the Catch 22 of development and tax. Without tax income, states in such countries cannot clean up their acts. But without cleaning up their acts such states cannot either enforce taxation and by convince the "moral" tax dodgers to pay up.

Anybody in the UK who uses a tax haven is, to put it mildly, not seen as respectable. But as our polemicists snarl about faraway tax havens with palm trees and beaches, we should ask ourselves why London property is thriving. Or why Scottish limited partnerships are being offered as "zero-tax firms" in the ex-USSR. Because we might just be the bad guys.

Do you know of a Scottish business or property owned in an overseas tax haven? Or of a Scottish company used as a vehicle to avoid tax overseas? Then please contact me, David Leask, at david.leask@theherald.co.uk