Financial Transparency Coalition

G20 Finance Ministers meeting in Istanbul this weekend still have much to do if the claim ‘the era of bank secrecy is over’ is to mean anything in developing counties. In a new report from Christian Aid, endorsed by 18 other civil society organisations, the flaws in the current approach of the G20 towards automatic exchange of tax information are laid bare. Joseph Stead, Christian Aid’s senior economic justice advisers said today: “There remain loopholes in the standards that will limit the impact in all countries, but for developing countries there are some specific challenges that remain, despite the promises of...

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...

LONDON - Significant international pressure from an increasing number of policy makers is steadily mounting against the secrecy offered by tax havens, says Christian Aid following the G20 in Cannes. While the Eurocrisis took centre stage at the summit, a series of important developments in the campaign for tax justice that emerged at the same time went largely unremarked.