Financial Transparency Coalition

Last week Algirdas Šemeta, EU Commissioner for Taxation and Customs Union, Audit and Anti-Fraud, made a presentation entitled The Importance of Information Exchange in Tax Matters. He was speaking in an official capacity, it seems. Like the Italian Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti, who recently criticised Germany’s and the UK’s tax deals with Switzerland, Šemeta gives

On a nasty Belgian back-room move to suppress European financial transparency. But first, some background. The European Union's savings tax directive is an excellent idea: governments automatically report to each other, on a multilateral basis, the income-generating assets of each other's citizens, so that those governments can tax them properly. Unfortunately, it is full of loopholes - punched in the directive as a result of efforts by the likes of Luxembourg, Austria and the United Kingdom to preserve as much secrecy as possible in the financial sector. Recently, some in the EU have been...

The Tax Justice Network has a new section on its website, entitled Offshore History. Currently, it contains just a few links pointing to documents that cover important elements in the growth of tax havens, or secrecy jurisdictions. Over time, more details will be added. Comments and suggestions for further material would be most welcome.

Jim Henry's book The Blood Bankers, published in 2005, is one of the best ever (and probably the best) investigative exposés of the blood and guts of the operations of global private banks (or pirate banks, as some call them) in developing countries. These institutions aggressively fostered and encouraged vast illicit financial flows, making large profits and leading to many countries being saddled with unsupportable debt, while their élites who had gorged on the borrowing salted away their winnings offshore. In Africa, the problem was bad enough, as this study...