Financial Transparency Coalition

The Tax Justice Network has long listed Israel as a tax haven - but most ignored the claim. Now the Sovereign Society is going out of its way to promote Israel as a tax haven. On this occasion we seem to be in agreement. And I don’t say that very often.

India is beginning to take the threat tax havens pose to it very seriously, partly because of the work my friends at Global Financial Integrity have done in exposing the enormous costs to India of tax haven abuse. The Hindu Business Line reports just how seriously the issue is being taken in the 2011 budget:

Transactions with entities in ‘non-cooperative’ jurisdictions that do not effectively exchange information with India may soon attract TDS (tax deduction at source) of at least 30 per cent. This is one of the several ‘anti-avoidance’ measures that the Finance Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, has proposed in...

The Independent has reported testimony in a UK employment tribunal yesterday where a butler and housekeeper are claiming unfair dismissal from their jobs at an Oxfordshire estate where they thought they worked for a man named Kevin Cash. However, there’s a twist:

Yesterday, to add confusion to their grievance, an employment tribunal was told that the couple had not been employed by Mr Cash. They were actually working for a trust based in a Caribbean tax haven, and therefore had no valid claim against him, his lawyers claimed. The mysterious Mr Cash is reputed to be worth £500m, but has...

Teodoro Nguema Obiang has controlled Equatorial Guinea since he executed his uncle in a bloody coup d’état in 1979. Equatorial Guinea, pictured to the right, is a country in Middle Africa on the coast. It is one of the smallest and wealthiest countries in the continent, in large part because it holds Africa’s largest oil reserves. Yet the wealth is extremely concentrated in the hands of the government and the ruling elite. As a result over 75% of the population lives below $2 per day, 35% of its citizens do not live past the age of...