Financial Transparency Coalition

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil / WASHINGTON, DC – More than US$400 billion flowed illegally out of Brazil between 1960 and 2012— draining domestic resources, driving the underground economy, exacerbating inequality, and facilitating crime and corruption—according to a new report to be published Monday, September 8^th at a press event in Rio de Janeiro by Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington DC-based research and advocacy organization. Titled “Brazil: Capital Flight, Illicit Flows, and Macroeconomic Crises, 1960-2012,” the study finds that trade misinvoicing—the fraudulent over- and under-invoicing of trade transactions—accounted for the vast majority (92.7 percent) of the country’s illicit financial outflows over the...

While Brazil is the only member of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, Indian, China, South Africa) bloc still alive in this year's World Cup, members from all five nations will reconvene on the Brazilian town of Fortaleza, just days after the tournament's conclusion. The 2013 BRICS Summit, held in South Africa, reaffirmed the group's commitment to economic development and stability. Ahead of this year's summit, which will be held July 15-17, the FTC offered a submission to the group on how and why financial transparency issues are vital to BRICS' agenda. You can read the full submission here.

Four years ago the Tax Justice Network wrote about FIFA’s so-called African “tax bubble” where FIFA was forcing a poor African country to forego its potential football tax revenues in order to funnel yet more money into FIFA’s gilded Zürich headquarters and its lucrative empire. We quoted Professor Han Kogels of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, who said:

“They want to create their own tax haven. A fully exempt situation. That is, FIFA and its FIFA subsidiaries that are fully exempt from any tax whatsoever levied at every level – state level, municipal level. All sorts of taxes: consumption taxes, income taxes...

For the first time, the Task Force Regional Representatives delivered specific recommendations to the BRICS governments, which met in South Africa this week. The BRICS countries hold a unique position among developing countries and emerging markets: they suffer from the same persistent problems relating to international taxation, transfer pricing, exchange of information, and tax evasion and avoidance that affect the rest of the developing world, but unlike many developing countries, hold significant power and influence at the international institutions and fora. All five BRICS are members of the G20, and Russia holds the Presidency this year.