Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray on Tuesday said the country needs a strong government but not of “one party with brute majority”, and batted for a coalition rule.

Speaking at his party’s annual Dussehra rally at Shivaji Park in central Mumbai, he said when the “chair” (of ruler) is unstable, the country becomes strong.

Mr Thackeray, who is part of the Opposition’s INDIA bloc, advocated a “mili-juli sarkar’ (coalition government) which can take everyone along, and cited the examples of governments under Manmohan Singh, P V Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

There was a time when Sena founder and his father late Bal Thackeray said that the country needed a strong government, Uddhav recalled.

“We have seen a strong government for nine years now. Have the issues of the people been resolved? “There should be a strong government, but not of any one party with a brute majority,” he added, targeting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), his friend-turned-foe.

The BJP or (its predecessor) Jana Sangh played no role in any struggle including that for the country’s freedom, Marathwada liberation struggle or the Samyukta (united) Maharashtra movement, the former chief minister claimed.

Attempts were being made to “steal” the Shiv Sena, he said, slamming the rival Sena led by Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.

Warning his rivals, Mr Thackeray said, “After we come to power, we will hang upside down those who are harassing us.” Attacking the BJP, Mr Thackeray said his party’s Hindutva was nationalism.

Slamming the Shinde government over the lathi-charge at Maratha protestors in Jalna last month, Thackeray said the Marathas were agitating for quota even when he was chief minister, but he never gave such orders.

Who was the “General Dyer” who ordered lathi-charge in Jalna, he asked.

The issue of reservation for Maratha, Dhangar and other communities can only be resolved by the Centre and Parliament, Thackeray further said.

The BJP creates a rift and then acts as a protector, he alleged.

Slamming Maharashtra assembly speaker Rahul Narwekar over “delay” in disqualifying rebel MLAs of the Shiv Sena, Thackeray said the country was not just watching how the case unfolds. If the speaker did not heed the Supreme Court’s direction (to hear disqualification petitions expeditiously), the people would be watching if an apex court exists in the country or not, he said.

Mr Thackeray also dared the Shinde-led government to hold elections and let people decide whether the rebel MLAs were “qualified or disqualified”.

Seeking to counter the BJP’s attack on dynastic politics, Thackeray said he was proud of his family.

“…a doctor’s son becomes a doctor. We are preserving the legacy of our family… Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud is also preserving the legacy of his family,” he said.

“He (Chandrachud) has occupied the position because of his merit. His father (Y V Chandrachud) too was the chief justice of the country and he was very strict,” Mr Thackeray said.

On the other hand, there were some leaders who came from obscure families and rose to power, Mr Thackeray said, citing the examples of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussain, Vladimir Putin and Muammar Gaddafi.

Targeting the Maharashtra government over the Ahmedabad-Mumbai bullet train project, he asked who will benefit from it.

The high-speed train project was being executed “so that traitors can quickly flee to Gujarat,” he quipped, and alleged that attempts were being made to “loot Mumbai.” All good investments were being diverted from Maharashtra to Gujarat and other states, Mr Thackeray claimed.

The Pakistani team was playing cricket in India when Indian soldiers were being shot at on the India-Pakistan border, the Sena (UBT) chief said.

After the speeches were over, effigies of Ravan and a demon dubbed as “khokasur” were burnt.

The Thackeray-led Sena has often accused the MLAs of the Shinde group of taking `khokas’ (crores of rupees) to switch loyalties which led to the collapse of the Thackeray government in June last year.

A third Donald Trump campaign lawyer reached a plea deal on Tuesday that could see her testify for the prosecution in future trials, turning up the pressure on the former president as his legal troubles grow.

A tearful Jenna Ellis, 38, pleaded guilty to charges related to Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss in the southern US state of Georgia. 

“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis told the court in Atlanta on Tuesday.

The deal allowed her to avoid jail time by admitting to one felony count of “aiding and abetting false statements and writings.”

It came after lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Sydney Powell also pleaded guilty last week.

They were among the 18 codefendants charged alongside Trump in the case, the only state-level proceeding thus far targeting the Republican for actions he took to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges of involvement in a criminal conspiracy to change the result in Georgia, where Biden won by some 12,000 votes.

Ellis, like Powell and Chesebro, received several years of probation, a $5,000 fine and 100 hours of community service, while agreeing to testify in any future trials.

After Trump’s November 2020 loss, Ellis made frequent appearances on television and in state legislative hearings to call for Biden’s victory not to be certified, citing false claims of irregularities.

According to a court filing, Ellis admitted that she helped attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Ray Stallings Smith, two other co-defendants in the case, submit false testimony to the Georgia state senate.

“In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence,” Ellis said in court.

Trial looms

Legal analysts have described the plea deals as a potential blow to Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination, as his former lawyers turn witnesses for the prosecution.

Cheseboro, 62, had been accused of orchestrating a scheme to submit a slate of fake electors to Congress in a bid to block certification of Biden’s election victory. He pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to file false documents.

Powell, 68, was a vocal Trump supporter who peddled outlandish conspiracy theories about voting machines allegedly designed in Venezuela under the late Hugo Chavez that “flipped” Trump votes to Biden votes.

She pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to interfere with the performance of election duties and was sentenced to six years of probation.

A trial date has not been set yet for the 77-year-old Trump, who on Tuesday was in a New York courtroom again to defend himself against a major civil fraud case.

In addition to the three ex-campaign lawyers, bail bondsmen Scott Hall has pleaded guilty to five counts of conspiracy to interfere with the performance of election duties.

Others indicted in Georgia include Giuliani, Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, John Eastman, a constitutional lawyer, and Jeffrey Clark, a mid-level Justice Department official.

Trump also faces federal charges for his efforts to upend the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol by his supporters. He is to go on trial in that case in Washington in March 2024.

Billionaires should face a minimum tax rate, a new report suggested after it found that some of the world’s mega-wealthy people are paying little to no tax. Researchers at the European Union (EU) Observatory said that most people pay a higher tax rate than the super-rich, who, according to them, are able to use complex business structures for avoidance. They suggested a minimum 2% tax rate on billionaires’ global health would raise $250 billion a year. 

According to the report, there are around 2,500 billionaires worldwide with a combined wealth of $13 trillion. Therefore, the researchers said the number of taxpayers affected by this proposal would be “very small” and they would be paying a “very modest” tax rate. 

“Even so, the revenue potential is large, due to the concentration of wealth at the top of the distribution and the low current tax rates of billionaires,” the researchers wrote in the report.

The EU Tax Observatory is a research laboratory co-funded by the European Union and based at the Paris School of Economics. According to the BBC, Its researchers said that the automatic sharing of the wealthy’s account information across more than 100 countries had significantly reduced offshore tax evasion. However, they also added that billionaires are still able to get away with paying tax rates equal to 0% or 0.5% of their wealth “due to the frequent use of shell companies to avoid income taxation”. 

The researchers commended an agreement in 2021 between 140 different countries to make sure companies pay at least 15% in corporation tax, but they also said that the plan had been “dramatically weakened” since then by a “growing list of loopholes”.

Currently, the world’s billionaires collectively pay around $44 billion a year in individual income taxes and wealth taxes, the researchers wrote. Introducing a 2% minimum wealth tax would boost this by about $214 billion, they estimated.

“It is time to establish a global minimum tax on the very rich,” Joseph Stiglitz, an economist, scholar, and Nobel Prize winner, wrote in the report, adding, “This may seem impossible to attain, but so was undermining bank secrecy and introducing a minimum tax on corporations just a few years ago.”

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Further, citing previous studies, the researchers said that billionaires have “very low” individual income taxes and wealth taxes. “When expressed as a fraction of income and considering all taxes paid at all levels of government beyond personal taxes … the effective tax rates of billionaires appear significantly lower than those of all other groups of the population,” they wrote.

The researchers also explained the reason why billionaires generally have low effective tax rates. According to them, billionaires in many countries use personal wealth-holding companies to distribute dividends and avoid paying income taxes. 

“So many people struggle to make ends meet yet pay the taxes their governments ask of them,” Mr Stiglitz continued. “We need to make sure those at the top of the income ladder who certainly have the financial means don’t wriggle out of them. Glaring tax disparity undermines the proper functioning of our democracy; it deepens inequality, weakens trust in our institutions, and erodes the social contract,” he added. 

Other measures that the researchers called for included increasing the minimum corporate tax rate to 25% and removing loopholes from it, creating a global asset registry, and introducing mechanisms to tax wealthy people who have been long-term residents in a country and move to a low-tax country.