Financial Transparency Coalition

If anyone ever doubted the sheer scale of corporate greed, they had the unedifying spectacle of Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to enlighten them last week. In already infamous evidence to a Senate Committee, he demonstrated there is no limit on what corporations will take from society. With the detachment of a sociopath, Cook said outright that he would not consider repatriating the $100bn they have hoarded offshore if it meant paying standard US corporation tax.

You are invited to the 2013 annual conference of the Financial Transparency Coalition, which will take place at the White Sands Hotel in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on October 1-2. Details about the conference and the agenda are available on the conference website. To register for the event, please click here.

Two great editorials today. The first, from the New York Times, responds to last week's Senate hearing over Apple's tax abuses by calling for country-by-country reporting, a Coalition policy goal, and ending corporate tax deferral in the United States. This is great news, and will hopefully help persuade U.S. policy measures to address the worst problems in their corporate tax code. The second, from the Financial Times, also calls for country-by-country reporting at the EU level. Furthermore, it calls for another Coalition policy goal, automatic exchange of tax information.

That Africa is poor is assumed, but rarely well explained. Generally, we—both in terms of those who study these issues and collectively as a society—have accepted the fact that Africa is underdeveloped. Yet this conclusion is neither forgone nor self-evident. Even more infuriating, it is often explained, but never sufficiently explained. That is, there are a lot of competing theories on the subject, but most fail to give a complete picture. Of course, it’s a complicated issue, so it makes sense that no one theory would prove universal. Yet, even with intense academic scrutiny, the picture is incomplete.