Financial Transparency Coalition

The summit between leaders of the world’s wealthiest economies will get underway next week in Northern Ireland. British Prime Minister David Cameron, leading the summit, has put three things at the top of his agenda: trade, tax, and transparency. There are a lot of issues directly relevant to the Financial Transparency Coalition in there, and I don’t have time to address them all, but one of the most promising, and interesting, is Cameron’s commitment to improving information on beneficial ownership of companies via public registries. Anonymity is prevalent under the world’s status quo. It is exceptionally easy (and relatively cheap)...

The swashbuckling pirates of olde amassed private fortunes by raiding ships and stealing them. Once they captured a ship, they would replace its flag — which represented one of the world’s sovereign nations — with the Jolly Roger. By flying the skull and crossbones, pirates proclaimed that they were out for their own benefit and theirs alone. Many American corporations are following this pirate tradition. Their crews aren’t sword-wielding ruffians, but high-priced lobbyists and accountants. They fight for, win, and then exploit loopholes in the tax code that allow multinational corporations to take profits earned in the United States and...

Canadians have about twice as much money squirreled away in tax havens as they did a decade ago, writes Tom Cardamone in the Canadian edition of The Huffington Post. With the G8 summit looming, will Canada's government support David Cameron's transparency reforms, including public registries of the true owners of companies?

The UK Government has announced that transparency and anti-corruption will be key elements at the G8 summit this year. Much needed action on money laundering provides an opportunity to live up to that promise. Corrupt money flows through the UK – in particular through our financial services industry. Nobody knows how much, but it is almost certainly many billions of pounds each year.