Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON, DC – A new report from Global Financial Integrity (GF), “Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2000-2009,” includes data on Tunisia, which GFI estimates is losing more than a billion U.S. dollars per year to illicit financial activities and official government corruption.

Tax is the foundation of all civilisations. The act of tracing tax policies and practices reveals the history of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, state and citizen. In Africa this relationship can be traced back over millennia. For instance, Egypt’s famed Rosetta Stone, created in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic era, was an agreement granting a tax exemption to priests, and certain reductions to the military and other ruling classes, including traders approved by the king. it was an early example of the special privileges that continue to proliferate across the continent.

A recent report from ActionAid made headlines when it accused SABMiller, the world’s second largest beer company, of avoiding millions of pounds worth of tax in India and the African countries in which it operates. ActionAid argues that through financial transactions with subsidiaries located in tax havens, SABMiller shifts its profits largely via royalty and management fees to firms in developed countries with lower tax rates. As a result, lower local profits mean less taxable income, and that denies governments the revenue needed to build key infrastructures such as schools, roads, and ports. On the other hand, Zahid...

The Thomson Reuters Foundation is partnering with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) to hold workshops for journalists in African countries to improve their expertise in financial journalism (Full Disclosure: Norad is also a major financial supporter of the Task Force on Financial Integrity & Economic Development). The sessions will have a specific focus on how to track illicit financial flows out of the developing world. From Thomson Reuters:

About 100 journalists, spread over eight courses in different African locations in the course of the next year, will receive intensive training to hone their financial reporting and analytical...