Financial Transparency Coalition

Corruption is not exclusive to Africa, of course. Yet official corruption is bound to be more glaring on a continent where most people live in dire poverty. And the news from Africa, as reported in the International Herald Tribune on June 10 by Celia W. Dugger, is that the fight against such corruption is not going well.

ZURICH (Dow Jones)--UBS AG (UBS) was again at the center of relations between Switzerland and the U.S. Tuesday as the two countries launched talks aimed at agreeing a double-tax treaty which experts say could have implications for the Swiss bank's ongoing legal battle with the Internal Revenue Service.

THE new tax law includes specific anti avoidance provisions which address the complex and contentious area of tax avoidance. Tax evasion or outright tax fraud has always been illegal and rightly dealt with as a crime. Business transactions designed to reduce or "legally" avoid tax by taking advantage of tax loopholes have been an area of considerable contention in almost all tax jurisdictions around the world.

Switzerland's largest bank, UBS, has proposed giving United States tax authorities banking data on some of its clients but with no names or account numbers attached.