Financial Transparency Coalition

This image comes from the Hindustan Times. I’m reproducing it. It shows just how important the British Overseas Territories are to the City of London and the tax abuse it promotes. And remember, it misses off the Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

As The Guardian reports this morning:

More than a third of the subsidiaries owned by major energy and mining companies including Shell, BP and Glencore are based in “secrecy jurisdictions” where company accounts are not publicly available, according to a report. The study by Publish What You Pay Norway, which campaigns for transparent accounting among oil, gas and mining giants, claims that populations in resource-rich countries are losing out because they are unable to extract financial information from businesses operating on their soil or off their seaboards. “Extractive industry giants’ corporate ownership structures, their use of secrecy jurisdictions and the...

Green MEP Sven Giegold tabled a question to the European Commission in July asking about the EU’s position on the IASB’s revision to its constitution that has downgraded its obligation to anyone but those people who use accounts to make investment decisions. I discussed that issue here. Now the Commission has replied as follows:

Answer given by Mr Barnier on behalf of the Commission The Commission shares the view of the Honourable Member regarding the importance of properly taking into account the public interest in the IFRS standards setting.

The tax deal between the UK and Switzerland initialed today is reported to:

retrospectively tax existing banking relationships in Switzerland, persons resident in the UK should be given one chance to make an anonymous lump-sum tax payment. The size of this tax burden will vary from between 19% to 34% of the assets in question, and will be determined based on the duration of the client relationship as well as the initial and final amount of the capital. Instead of such a payment, those affected should also have the possibility of disclosing their banking relationship in Switzerland to the British authorities.

To...