Financial Transparency Coalition

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...

So the latest big tax haven whistleblower, Antoine Deltour, is facing the combined massed might of Luxembourg, one of the world’s biggest and most aggressive tax havens, and PWC, one of the biggest and most aggressive lobbyists for offshore tax and secrecy legislation, the Big Four accounting firm. Deltour faces up to ten years in prison.

The final two months of 2014 saw a surge of positive news for civil society whose collaborative and consolidated efforts over recent years to push for greater corporate transparency measures are now seeing the light. Civil society has called for greater light to be shed on the real living people who ultimately own or control companies – the beneficial owners. Current levels of secrecy mean that global detection rates for illicit funds by law enforcement are as low as 1 percent for criminal proceeds.

Not that long ago, Credit Suisse AG (CSAG), the multinational financial services giant, pleaded guilty to felony criminal charges and paid fines of US$2.6 billion for aiding and assisting U.S. taxpayers “in filing false income tax returns and other documents with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)”. In other words, Credit Suisse helped Americans evade taxes and showed them how to take advantage of the international financial system’s inherent secrecy, even brining secret airports and elevators into the picture, according to a U.S. Senate report. But now that they’ve admitted to...