Livingston will join the House of Lords, replacing the former HSBC chief executive and chairman Lord Green, who has served as a minister since early 2011 and is approaching retirement.

The son of a Glasgow GP, Livingston’s talent was spotted early by the Dixons chairman Sir Stanley Kalms, who made Livingston the youngest FTSE 100 finance director at the age of 32. He joined BT in the same role, before becoming chief executive in June 2008 at the age of 43.

Having transformed the former national telecoms monopoly, which was struggling under a towering pension fund deficit and spiralling costs at its global services division, he leaves in September.

It will fall to Livingston’s successor Gavin Patterson, currently head of BT Retail, which sells broadband, calls and pay TV under the BT and Plusnet brands, to bring to a successful conclusion the challenge against BSkyB that begins in August with the launch of two BT sports channels.

Livingston has overseen a share price rise from a nadir of 75p to over 300p on Wednesday, a performance which has brought pay rewards of over £16m over the last two years alone as long term incentive schemes bore fruit. News of his surprise departure saw the shares shed 3.5% to 308p.

He launched the group’s programme to replace antiquated copper telephone lines with the fibre-optic cables capable of meeting the needs of high speed internet in the digital age, and signed the £738m cheque for the three years of Premier League football matches that have pitched BT into battle against Rupert Murdoch’s satellite broadcaster.

Sir Michael Rake, chairman of BT, said: “Ian has done a tremendous job in transforming BT. His decision to accept a government post demonstrates the sense of public service which many of us know to be characteristic. He leaves behind him a very capable team, one which will take forward the strategy that has served BT well and which lays out the path to further success.”

Livingston, 48, will join the House of Lords prior to taking up his front bench government post in December. He said: “It has been an incredibly hard decision to leave BT at such an exciting time. However, the opportunities ahead and the strength of the management team that Gavin will lead mean that the company is in a great position.”

Patterson joined BT in January 2004 as managing director of its consumer division, having previously spent four years at Telewest. Before that, he was European marketing director for the consumers goods giant Procter and Gamble.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jun/19/bt-chief-executive-ian-livingston-leaves

Gurpreet Singh Chadda ran sale-and-rent-back schemes under the names Black Homes and BL through which he bought properties from homeowners in financial difficulty and allowed them to continue to live in them while paying rent.

While it is not unusual for such schemes to pay less than the market value for a property, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) found that Chadda had faked valuations and exaggerated legal costs to maximise the amount he made from each transaction. In two cases examined by the FCA, sellers only received 38% of the sale price of their homes.

Chadda also failed to inform sellers that he had found separate purchasers for them who were paying the full price and in some cases he kept more than half the cash.

The FCA said it believed he had received £695,277 from the seven transactions it examined, and that these charges were unfair and excessive.

It also found that he had helped the purchasers of the properties obtain mortgages by disguising the fact that the sellers would continue to live there. In one case he drafted a letter for a buyer to pass to their lender saying the seller would be moving out.

Handing down its largest-ever fine to a sole trader, totalling £945,277, the FCA said Chadda had aggravated the situation by making false and misleading statements, failing to disclose relevant documents and information and creating misleading documents. It said he had also arranged for people to impersonate his customers to mislead the regulator.

Tracey McDermott, the FCA’s director of enforcement and financial crime, said Chadda represented “a serious risk to customers and lenders alike”.

She said: “Chadda’s misconduct is the most shocking we have seen from a home finance arranger. He is a disgrace to financial services.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/jun/19/fca-fines-rogue-property-trader

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2013/jun/19/diet-coke-man-andrew-cooper-video

Crozier’s breakthrough book, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1963 in French, 1964 in English), is a still wonderful account of how an organisation as a system generates the overlapping vicious circles that then block the system. The voices of his interviewees in two public service organisations, one a clerical agency, the other a state industrial monopoly, explaining their attitudes and their behaviour, are as fresh as if they had been uttered yesterday. This book heralded a consistent theme in Crozier’s work that organisational reform is not possible unless its proponents take into account the way that people will interpret it, react to it and subvert it. As Crozier put it in the title of a 1979 book: “You can’t change a society by decree.”

His findings and his analysis were not only theoretically important, refining the work of one of the founding fathers of sociology, Max Weber, to show what really happens behind the organisation chart. As applied to French public administration and French society as a whole, his work called for a much more sophisticated understanding of the rigidities about which a French elite constantly complains. Crozier pursued these ideas in The Stalled Society (1970 in French, 1973 in English) and in the theoretical classic Actors and Systems (1977), co-written with Erhard Friedberg.

Crozier got into sociology by chance. He was born in north-eastern France, at Sainte-Menehould in the Marne department, into what he described as a happy suburban family. His initial studies were in business and law at the Paris business school Hautes Etudes Commerciales. Then he was given a scholarship to spend 14 months in the US, where he chose to interview American shop stewards.

He was at that time, he wrote in his 2002 autobiography, Mémoires, “something of a poet, vaguely surrealist and even a bit of revolutionary with Trotskyite tendencies”. The CIA dogged him. But he came back with a wealth of interviews which gave him a permanent taste for fieldwork, produced a prizewinning thesis in 1949, and gained him entry to the French national research organisation, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

In 1961 he was able to create his own CNRS centre, the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, to pursue the strategic analysis for which he was becoming famous, and away from what he considered the narrowness of the French university. From 1959 he had a continuing collaboration with American social scientists at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Palo Alto, California, and later at Harvard. It was a model of the fruits of international academic exchange, though somewhat dampened by his book The Trouble with America (1980 in French, 1984 in English).

In the mid-1970s I was sent to Paris with a Sisyphean task set by the magazine New Society of trying to interview the god figures of French sociology. It was a disaster: I came away feeling I had been eaten for dinner by both Bourdieu and Touraine and had not fully appreciated Boudon. Chastened, I didn’t try to see Crozier face to face. It turned out he had long resented Bourdieu’s “colonisation” of public opinion, about which he wrote scathingly in Mémoires.

When I did eventually meet him in the 1990s, he was still a stylish, dapper figure and a hopeful social reformer, berating top civil servants for not learning the lessons of his work.

Crozier’s first wife predeceased him. Three daughters of that marriage and his second wife survive him.

• Michel Crozier, sociologist, born 6 November 1922; died 24 May 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/jun/19/michel-crozier

Let’s start with the good news. Thanks in no small measure to the British government, which punched well above its weight, tax and transparency are firmly on the G8 radar. We now have a development agenda that goes beyond aid – one that links rich-country concerns over tax erosion to the loss of development finance in the poorest countries. There are also encouraging signs that tax justice is mobilising public opinion.

Then there’s the communique itself. If you had offered veteran tax reform advocates the language in the Lough Erne document a year ago, many would have grabbed it with both hands. If implemented effectively, the pledge to move towards automatic exchanges of information between tax authorities could limit some forms of tax evasion. There are also promises to develop G8 action plans.

Add to this the pledges to move towards disclosure of beneficial company ownership, commitments to engage developing countries in information-sharing, and to support tax authorities in developing countries, and you have a reasonable package.

The problems start with the underlying (lack of) detail. Take the national action plans that the G8 countries have agreed to draw up to combat tax evasion and illicit transfers. The 10 principles that guide the development of the plans are broadly the right ones, but they already underpin company reporting laws in most of the G8 (Russia being an exception).

Similarly, the commitment to automatic exchange of information between tax authorities is a positive step. However, this is an extension of the tax information exchange agreements (TIEAs) that have been developed, to little real effect, under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) over the past decade.

The G8 summit will add political momentum to efforts to establish more open reporting systems on companies and banking systems. But will the UK enforce compliance with reporting on beneficial ownership for overseas territories? The British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands have some of the world’s most opaque company registries – and both are at the heart of global webs for tax evasion and illicit transfers. Will the US legislate to enforce transparency on Delaware – a world centre for shell companies? What is the time frame for implementing the national action plans? And who will monitor compliance with the commitments undertaken at Lough Erne?

That last question does have a partial answer: the G8 will “self-report” to the public. But this is surely a poor substitute for independent auditing and review by some of the countries that have most to gain from effective action, including developing countries in Africa and other regions.

Parts of the communique bear the scars of protracted and difficult negotiations. Some G8 countries – including Britain and France – have promoted some far-reaching measures. Both wanted the communique to include a provision that the proposed registries for reporting on beneficial company ownership would be open to public scrutiny. Thanks to some impressive rearguard action by more recalcitrant G8 members – notably Russia and a less-than-enthusiastic Germany – the communique calls for the information to be made available to tax authorities and government agencies only. This will dilute the effectiveness of the registries.

There are some positive declarations on developing countries. Here, too, the UK deserves credit for highlighting the revenue losses sustained by Africa and other regions. There is a pledge to ensure that information will be shared with tax authorities in the developing world, and the G8 recognises that poor countries need capacity-building support. Unfortunately, most of this restates broad principles and approaches already set out in a 2011 report to the G20 (pdf).

This is an area in which the communique would have been strengthened by some clear provisions. An embryonic structure for tax co-operation with developing countries is already in place operating under OECD auspices. The Tax Inspection Without Borders initiative launched last year was an innovative move to deepen co-operation between rich and poor countries. Similarly, the Africa Partnership Forum has facilitated a useful dialogue on information-sharing with the OECD (pdf). But dialogue is no substitute for a concerted plan of action backed by clear commitments on finance and technical support to build the capacity of African tax authorities to combat tax evasion and illicit transfers.

At the very least, surely the G8 should have requested the IMF and the World Bank to draw up strategies for support commensurate with the level of ambition set out in the communique, and to prompt them to scale up their capacity-building efforts to combat tax evasion and illicit transfers.

If the G8 can’t agree to act decisively on a problem that is exposing some of the poorest countries to plunder through dubious extractive industry dealings, what hope is there that its members will be listened to by China, Australia and Brazil in the G20?

Perhaps it’s unfair to set a high bar for judging the G8 commitment on tax. But when all’s said and done, the G8 governments have to be judged against their own claims – and the collective claims made in the communique are not modest.

“We will act,” the leaders declared, “to restore confidence in the fairness and effectiveness of our international tax rules and practices, and to ensure that each country is able to collect taxes owing and that developing countries are also able to secure the benefits of progress made on this agenda.”

I’m left with just one question – when?

The answer will depend on what comes next. With the G20 summit scheduled for September, there is an opportunity to engage a wider group of governments, and to put flesh on the bare bones of the Lough Erne communique. But combating the global pandemic of tax evasion and illicit finance will take more than encouraging words.

• Kevin Watkins is executive director of the Overseas Development Institute. A longer version of this article is available on the ODI site

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/jun/19/g8-tax-avoidance