Financial Transparency Coalition

Below is a must-see video from Al Jazeera English, reporting on the report by Action Aid UK on tax avoidance by sugar companies in Zambia. The report finds that British Foods Group, a major supplier of sugar in Zambia, made a profit of $123 million since 2007, but paid virtually no taxes. The losses include over $80 million in funds moved to tax havens, and a $47 million 'management fee' from British Food Group's Irish subsidiary. And this is all in addition the billions of illicit dollars leaving Zambia every year.

The United Kingdom is shifting some tax laws to make it easier for multinational corporations to avoid taxes via tax havens, through vehicles known as Controlled Foreign Corporations (CFCs). These vehicles are commonly used in the United States, and elsewhere, to shift profits to low tax jurisdictions. They are a legal way of pretending you made more where you did not. You would think that any smart country would be moving toward stricter laws to prevent the use of tax havens for profit shifting and corporate tax avoidance, but that's not the most important part of the law's impact....

It was a busy Tuesday night for the tax justice campaign team. Many of us here at ActionAid were hearing from the fantastic campaigners that we had speaking at our event (more on that later). And a few more were glued to the Finance Bill debate in Parliament.

In 1862 Victor Hugo, widely considered one of France’s greatest poets, published Les Misérables, literally translated to The Miserable Ones. The story, which has been adapted into dozens of versions in film, television, radio, and most famously as a musical—follows the story of a man who survives persecution amidst social and political upheavals in 19th century Paris. While the story traverses countless themes and motifs, one of the central ideas of the novel is social injustice and Hugo uses the novel as a platform to condemn the unjust class-based structure of the times. Today Action Aid released data on the...