Financial Transparency Coalition

Plenty of column inches have been given over to debating whether or not former Prime Minister of Luxembourg Jean-Claude Juncker will become president of the European Commission in recent weeks. Politically speaking, potatoes don’t come much hotter, but we’re not really interested in that, and as not-for-profit organisations, we are completely non-partisan anyway. Assuming that he does get in, it is going to be really interesting to see how he will support the major strides that Europe has made promoting transparency and accountability in business.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” He might well have said development. Regions that have experienced the fastest growth in the last fifty years have also had a tax base they could use to invest in the infrastructure of growth – roads, schools, and health. While some have argued that taxes impede growth, the long-term picture doesn’t sit well with that theory.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS for short, recently became the world’s wealthiest terrorist organizations. In fact, with an estimated net worth of $2 billion, according to the International Business Times, ISIS may have more cash than the gross domestic product of several small countries including Gibraltar, the Virgin Islands, and Palau. ISIS has achieved this feat in a relatively short time span. Over the last few years, ISIS has made a lot of money in some traditional avenues: mainly through activities like plundering, pillaging, and extortion. ISIS has also gained controlled several...

G8 countries have yet to live up to the important commitments they made on tax and transparency at their Northern Ireland summit a year ago.  According to new analysis by Christian Aid, Action Aid, Global Witness and the Financial Transparency Coalition the UK government needs to build on its leadership if there is to be a strong and lasting legacy to the tax commitments made at Lough Erne. At the gathering hosted by David Cameron at Lough Erne on 17^th and 18^th June 2013, G8 leaders declared that they would tackle some of the ways in which rich and poor...