Financial Transparency Coalition

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...

David McNair of Christian Aid has an article on Comment is Free at the Guardian this morning. Talking about the proposed tax agreement with Switzerland he says:

The government might call it pragmatism but its talks with Switzerland, about how to tackle the £100bn or so which Britons have hidden in Swiss bank accounts, suggest that it is suffering from both naivety and a severe case of beggar-thy-neighbour. What the two governments have said is that they will try to do a deal to give the UK some of the tax that its...

LONDON—Christian Aid is calling on the winner of this Sunday’s general election in Tanzania to commit to ending tax anomalies that have deprived a country rich in mineral resources of badly needed revenue that could have been spent on schools, hospitals and other infrastructure improvements.

We have been reading occasional stories about the foreclosure mess in the United States. For those who don't know about it, here is a quick summary, to start with. In the run-up to the financial crisis that erupted in 2007, banks and other financial institutions packaged up bundles of mortgages into entities which were then themselves diced up and sold on, once or more than once, to other investors, in a process known as securitisation. The chain of ownership between houseowner and the ultimate holder of the mortgage risk often involved many links,...