Financial Transparency Coalition

In late June, we met with members of the Tax Justice Network Africa (TJN-A) and the Africa International Trade Union Confederation (Africa ITUC) for a training and strategy session in Naivasha, a town northwest of Nairobi. The goal of the event was to bring people together to discuss and analyze the problem of illicit financial flows and the lack of transparency, particularly within the extractive sector. It wasn't long after we left the city limits of Nairobi that the landscape changed dramatically, quickly shifting from shopping malls and apartment complexes...

I have the following article in the latest edition of the London Review of Books:

In his budget last month George Osborne announced that if in the future a UK company runs its internal banking arrangements through a tax haven subsidiary it will benefit from a special tax rate of just 5.75 per cent of the resulting profits. The rate is exceptionally low: the same activity undertaken in the UK is taxed at 23 per cent. It is a change that will delight corporate tax avoiders everywhere: the UK will now condone the use of tax havens in locations such as...

The ConDem government has announced a further development in its plan to turn the UK into a tax haven. As the FT reports this morning:

Multimillionaire foreigners prepared to invest their money in Britain will find it easier to make a home in the UK under government plans to relax immigration rules for the super-rich. The Home Office will shortly propose changes to “investor visas” to encourage more rich people to live and invest in the UK.

Under the plans:

I reported yesterday that the zero / 10 tax regimes adopted by all three of the Crown Dependencies have failed the test set by the European Commission for compliance with the EU Code of Conduct for Business Taxation (Guernsey has failed by default). There are those who do, of course, wish to ignore the news and that is their prerogative. I admit that this is a leak, but one which I’m entirely confident is right. Failure on three out of five counts is a dramatic rejection of the deliberately abusive structure of zero...