Financial Transparency Coalition

We are delighted to see this from Brazil's respected Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos (INESC,) which has launched a Brazilian (Portuguese-language) campaign, as part of our global End Tax Haven Secrecy (ETHS) initiative. The new site, Fim aos Paraísos Fiscais, is supported by a wide range of organisations and the launch got good media coverage in Brazil. Take a look at these reports, for example:

The European Commission has just published a new study, entitled Transfer Pricing and Developing Countries, which looks particularly at the application of rules with respect to Ghana, Honduras, Kenya and Vietnam. We have not yet parsed this report in any detail - but we will. From the outset we are discouraged by two things in particular. The first appears on the very first page (and in the top right of every subsequent page), and the accompanying picture shows it: That should be a red flag, straight away. There is a battle growing in the field of transfer pricing, especially with respect to...

Ten years ago today, the New York Times reported the words of U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill who, in testimony:

"dismissed as meaningless a document, based on government data, presented by the senator, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, indicating that fewer than 6,000 of more than 1.1 million offshore accounts and businesses were properly disclosed and therefore legal. Pressed by Senator Levin about whether the disparity between reported offshore accounts and their actual numbers was significant, Mr. O'Neill replied: ''I find it amusing.''

The scale of it was startling, even then:

"His testimony, to the...

Two years ago an edition of Tax Justice Focus contained a lead article entitled Shadow Regulation and the Shadow Banking System: the role of the Dublin International Financial Services Centre. Written by Jim Stewart, Senior Lecturer in Finance, Trinity College, Dublin, it looked at the role in the global financial crisis played by the tax haven / secrecy jurisdiction of Ireland, and in particular the Dublin International Financial Services Centre (IFSC.) We added this to our Economic Crisis + Offshore webpage. Now we have just added to that same web page a major new article by...