Financial Transparency Coalition

In this moneyed, waterfront city, locals sail their yachts in the sunset and fill the parking lots of fine restaurants with luxury cars, while billboards along Lake Geneva advertise $20,000 wristwatches for sale, private islands for lease and private banks for safekeeping your fortune from the prying eyes.

I’ve just blogged a letter sent to the FT by some of the leaders of the UK’s financial services industry in which they say:

If the only question is, “Is it legal and profitable?”, then all that matters is that what is done complies with the regulations in force and makes a profit for the seller and the institution they represent. At its most extreme this philosophy undermines any concern for the best interests of the customer, and subordinates these entirely to the pure self-interest of the seller in maximising profit as...

Greece’s parliament has pushed through legislation that in effect grants a tax amnesty to millions of citizens, in a move at odds with organisations overseeing the country’s bail-out.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote an article here entitled The hidden hands behind tax havens, where we noted that:

Secrecy jurisdictions are not merely an atomised grouping of mostly small states exercising their sovereign rights to set their own tax, secrecy and regulatory rules and laws as they please. Nearly all of the small states are, instead, substantially protected and controlled by larger powers, notably OECD countries, and of these the United Kingdom is by far the most important.

Now we have a new piece...