Financial Transparency Coalition

If people stash their wealth or earn income overseas, that is fine with us — just as long as their tax authorities get the information they need to tax that wealth or income according to the law, and as long as money laundering and financial crimes can be effectively tracked, and so on. Where there are cross-border barriers to the instruments of democratic societies, then there is an offshore problem. The only credible way to provide the necessary information is through so-called automatic information exchange (AIE), where governments make sure the necessary information is available across borders, as a matter of routine. For years we at the Tax Justice...

In the January 2015 Taxcast: how offshore is ruining the ‘Beautiful Game': the Taxcast scrutinises football’s own goal. Also: how banks with criminal convictions are being allowed to continue to handle our money, how people may be allowed to apply for anonymity in the UK’s new register of beneficial owners of companies to be introduced in 2016, and the meeting of the world’s most powerful in that bastion of transparency, Davos, Switzerland. Plus more scandal and unique analysis.

President Obama wants to stop the billions of dollars that are moving offshore from U.S. companies.

Or he at least said so much during his State of the Union address last night:

As Americans, we don't mind paying our fair share of taxes, as long as everybody else does, too. But for far too long, lobbyists have rigged the tax code with loopholes that let some corporations pay nothing while others pay full freight. This year, we have an opportunity to change that. Let's close loopholes so we stop rewarding companies that keep profits abroad, and reward those that...

The lux leaks saga moved up a couple of gears last week. First of all, a large number of MEPs broke ranks with their leadership to publicly back a European Parliament committee of enquiry into the so-called ‘sweetheart deals’ that Luxembourg concluded with hundreds of multinational companies to minimise their tax bill. The Parliament’s political decision-making body, the Conference of Presidents, has yet to formally approve the enquiry but the genie seems to be well and truly out of the bottle now, even if there are reports that EPP deputies are being put under pressure to withdraw their signatures.  The enquiry...