Financial Transparency Coalition

An old industrial dynasty from the German Ruhr region might play a role in blasting the envisaged transparency regulations for the extractive industry proposed by the EU commission. It is one of those typical German Mittelstand (SME) family-owned businesses, which was founded in 1842 by Wilhelm Grillo, and grew into an industrial giant, the Grillo-Werke AG. The core competence on zinc, the company focuses on zinc metallurgy and sulphur chemistry, has an estimated annual turnover of around 600 million Euro, around 1600 employees and is headed by Ulrich Grillo.

DG TAXUD, the taxation and customs department of the EU civil service, is working on a strategy on tax havens and unfair tax competition to be released in the last quarter of the year. This is an extremely welcome step, as the communication addresses several key issues. It recognises that not only double taxation but also double non-taxation is a problem when working out how to tax cross border wealth and income; proposes the introduction of automatic information exchange at EU level; and explores several concrete measures against non-cooperative tax jurisdictions and aggressive tax planning. However, in many ways...

This is the current message that the EU’s current anti-money laundering rules send to those in a position to launder the proceeds of tax evasion. It is a crime to launder the proceeds of tax evasion if the tax evader you help, gets caught and goes to prison for more than a year, 11months and its fine. For those considering whether or not tax evasion is a serious crime, it is worth pointing out that a Christian Aid study found that even with a very conservative estimate the money lost by developing countries to tax evasion by multinational companies...

The Tax Justice Network has blogged repeatedly on the thoroughly toxic and dangerous tax deals that Switzerland has signed with Germany and the UK and others and is seeking to expand as a model to other countries. We have demonstrated on several occasions that the deals - which are supposed to apply withholding taxes on secret assets, in exchange for continued anonymity - are all but worthless, from a technical point of view (that is, they are absolutely riddled with loopholes, and will raise only a fraction of the promised sums; we have sent our detailed analysis to tax...