Financial Transparency Coalition

LONDON / WASHINGTON – U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz of Minnesota is an educated man. He earned his law degree from Harvard, won a coveted clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and taught the law for more than a decade before joining the bench in 2006.But when Wells Fargo, the retail banking giant, and the U.S. Justice Department squared off in his courtroom last year over the legality of a fiendishly complicated tax scheme known as “STARS,’’ even Schiltz quickly realized he was not equipped to parse the facts.“I fear I may finally have met my match,”...

Should the World Bank’s private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) set a clear policy regulating its investments in companies registered in tax havens? This question led a few weeks ago to one of the most heated discussions ever on the Executive Board of this institution. Last year, European NGOs asked their Executive Directors at the World Bank to set up binding guidelines to ban IFC investments in companies operating through tax havens. In response to pressure by civil society, the World Bank has taken swift action to start up this discussion; however, the Bank has not gone...