Financial Transparency Coalition

Cayman News Service has blown the lid on one of the biggest lies of recent years about tax havens / secrecy jurisdiction. It’s been claimed since 2009 that tax information exchange agreements – promoted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as the way to tackle tax haven abuse – mean that tax havens are now ‘open and transparent places’.

Yesterday afternoon I got a phone call from a private banking insider – somebody who knows the industry intimately – who had objected to some things we have blogged recently. One was yesterday's Bahamas blog; the other was a blog last month entitled Brazil gets tough on global pirate bankers. That picked up a Bloomberg story looking at the arrest of a Brazilian private banker, Alexandre Caiado, who got arrested for apparently selling tax evasion services, and who seemed mystified as to why he had been targeted. Our blog expressed approval that...

A while ago we pointed to a study by Misereor that had concluded, on the subject of double tax treaties (DTTs) and tax information exchange agreements (TIEAs), that Only 6 percent of DTTs show a signature of a Low Income Country (with an even smaller participation of 3 percent for Least Developed Countries). The situation with TIEAs is even worse: There is no single LIC (leaving aside LDC) as signing party of any TIEA documented on the OECD website. . . . While G20 and OECD are promoting DTTs and TIEAs as centrepieces of a global standard on transparency...