Financial Transparency Coalition

As the Wall Street Journal notes this morning:

It’s time to move on to other shores for European banks serving wealthy clients: Switzerland will remain famous for its cheese but not for its banking secret anymore. Monday ABN Amro, the Netherlands’ third biggest bank, announced the decision to sell its private banking operations in Switzerland to local operator Union Bancaire Privee. The move can be seen as the start of a migration of smaller non-Swiss banks from a country which was the perfect place for tax evaders for decades.

David McNair of Christian Aid has an article under the first part of the above title in the Guardian today. David is right to draw attention to the toxic nature of a new deal between Germany and Switzerland – but the UK is also set to sign such a deal very soon. I wrote about this in May, saying the following, and nothing has changed since:

The FT reported today that the UK is to shortly sign a new tax deal with Switzerland. As it said:

Britons with billions of pounds hidden in Switzerland will pay tax...

This report is the first that PCS has produced on the subject of tax havens. It has prepared it for four reasons. First, PCS is committed to a fair, progressive tax system. It sees tax havens (or secrecy jurisdictions as we prefer to call them) as a threat to the establishment of such a system. This report notes that the UK might lose up to £18 billion a year as a result of the use of tax havens. This loss contributes significantly to the overall UK tax gap that PCS believes currently amounts to at least £120 billion.

When I first looked at the subsidy the UK gave to the Isle of Man through its VAT sharing agreement I came to the conclusion that the sum involved exceeded £200 million a year. In 2009 the UK government removed £140 million of that subsidy a year. Yesterday they announced intention to increase the withdrawal if subsidy to a total of £215 million a year – very close to the sum I first calculated.