Financial Transparency Coalition

A new corruption scandal erupts almost every month in India. But even here, the secretly taped phone conversations of a powerful lobbyist have shocked most people.

A few weeks ago ten activists, mostly in their twenties, met in the Nag's Head pub in North London and started to discuss protesting against severe austerity measures being implemented by Britain's coalition govermnent. Instead of protesting simply against cuts, they thought it would be more interesting to launch a strike against tax-dodging  multinational corporations. Building on analyses of the UK's so-called Tax Gap, a subject where the Tax Justice Network's Senior Adviser Richard Murphy has been especially influential, the young activists could see this was a clear and coherent alternative to the government's austerity programme. The group called...

The U.S. extended its crackdown on offshore tax evasion, charging former UBS AG banker Renzo Gadola with helping American clients hide assets from the Internal Revenue Service by shifting them to a smaller Swiss bank.

The European Union is undertaking a consultation on country-by-country reporting, the closing date for submissions being 22 December. At their request I have prepared a quite lengthy submission which elaborates and advances the case for country-by-country reporting by multinational corporations in a number of significant ways. This has been published by the Tax Justice Network: As the summary says:

This report is a full response to the questions posed by the European Commission in public consultation on country-by-country reporting by multinational companies, published in October 2010. The submission elaborates the summary responses posted on line to the European...