Our Man at the United Nations - Michael Lennard 

Michael Lennard  (SVC 1971-78) is Chief of International Tax Cooperation in the Financing for Sustainable Development Office of the United Nations in New York and is Secretary of the UN Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters. 

This work has a particular focus on ensuring the fairness and workability of international tax norms, including achieving greater developing country input into those norms, and encouraging cooperation to improve tax systems and administrations, as a spur to sustained development. He currently leads the UN Secretariat work on taxing Multinationals in an increasingly globalised and digitalised world and combatting international profit shifting.

Previously Michael was a tax treaty adviser in the OECD Tax Treaty Secretariat in Paris for three years and prior to that he worked on tax treaty and other international tax matters at the Australian Tax Office. He had earlier worked in the Australian government’s Office of International Law, advising ministers and departments on diverse public international law issues.

Michael has led Australian negotiating teams on trade, investment, environmental and tax treaty matters and has prepared argument for matters before the Australian High Court, the US Supreme Court and the WTO. His published work on treaty interpretation has been cited before WTO panels and before the WTO Appellate Body. He has delivered lectures or seminars at universities including Harvard, Oxford, New York, Leiden, Vienna, O.P. Jindal Global (India), Uppsala, Maastricht, Madrid, Max Planck Institute Munich, Limerick, Amsterdam, Buenos Aries, Lausanne, Sydney, and LSE. He regularly speaks at major tax events internationally.

Michael has degrees from the University of Tasmania, the Australian National University and Cambridge. After a UN sabbatical at Oxford University, he begins a part time Doctorate in Law there in September 2021.

Michael is a proud product of Tasmania and has extremely fond memories of his time and his education, in happily simpler times, at St Virgil’s (admitting to the occasional flash memories of Hannibal’s battle tactics in Latin – a subject he loved) and the University of Tasmania. His first day at school was Black Tuesday 1967, but it got better after that. Even though his treasured parents Doreen and Jack have passed in recent years, he and his wife Rita still love visiting Tasmania, (a joy recently denied) and catching up with his five brothers and their wonderful families.