Financial Transparency Coalition

We are delighted to see this from Brazil's respected Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos (INESC,) which has launched a Brazilian (Portuguese-language) campaign, as part of our global End Tax Haven Secrecy (ETHS) initiative. The new site, Fim aos Paraísos Fiscais, is supported by a wide range of organisations and the launch got good media coverage in Brazil. Take a look at these reports, for example:

The international edition of the Financial Times has a comment by TJN's Nick Shaxson and John Christensen evaluating how far the G-20 countries have progressed towards their stated goal of tackling banking secrecy and tax havens. The title says it all: "Time to black-list the tax haven whitewash." In April 2009 British prime minister Gordon Brown, the then G-20 president, issued the following commitment:

"to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens. We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published...

So far, 2011 has not been a comfortable year for the tax dodger. One month in and WikiLeaks is preparing to publish the names of thousands of offshore account holders in Switzerland, UK based companies like Vodafone have been criticised for alleged aggressive tax avoidance, and following a high profile corruption scandal, India’s media is hungry to expose the horrors of a system which allows billions of dollars to flow out of the country every year. Best estimates suggest that Africa has lost US$854 billion to illicit outflows of capital in the past three decades – aided and abetted...