Financial Transparency Coalition

Rumour reaches me the Foot Report will be out tomorrow. It’s interesting to speculate on what this report can now add to the issues the Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories now face. Since it was announced almost a year ago the Turks & Caicos Islands have passed into British control, Cayman has seen its economic wings clipped and has been ordered to tax, all three Crown Dependencies have been told their system of corporate taxation is unacceptable and must be reformed and the Isle of Man has had £140 million of its VAT subsidy withdrawn leaving it...

The following are the speaking notes for a lecture I am giving this morning at the Treasury ——————– The title of this lecture has, I note been advertised as “Tax and morality – fellow travellers in an uncertain world?” But let me make clear, I’m not here to give a lecture on morality, per se. I think it fair to say I know something about tax, accounting and economics, having been trained in each of them. But I am only an amateur philosopher. And I have no real intention of moving out of my comfort zone, especially when there are some...

Austria To Veto EU-Liechtenstein Tax Treaty - Fin Ministry. Dow Jones reports:

VIENNA -(Dow Jones)- Austria intends to veto a planned multilateral tax treaty between the European Union and Liechtenstein , the Austrian finance ministry said Monday.

The treaty, due to be discussed by the E.U.’s finance ministers Tuesday, aims to introduce the automatic exchange of tax information on foreign nationals between Liechtenstein and E.U. states.

I’ve written more words on secrecy jurisdictions than most. I’m credited by some with defining the term. Now the research project on secrecy jurisdictions on which I have been working with a small but first rate team from the Tax Justice Network (Markus Meinzer, John Christensen and Paul Sagar) has delivered its first output. That output is on secrecyjurisdictions.com. You could pass an hour or two there easily: actually, rather more than that as this is, almost without doubt, the biggest database on secrecy jurisdictions ever built. There are something like 1,800 pages of data on the site...