Financial Transparency Coalition

G20 leaders meeting in Seoul last week issued a lengthy communiqué accompanied by an annex fleshing out the “Seoul development consensus for shared growth.” The recognition that “there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ formula for development success and that developing countries must take the lead in designing and implementing development strategies” is a welcome one. However, the G20 call for “inclusive and sustainable growth” fails to provide concrete measures to ensure that poor people in poor countries reap the benefits of economic growth. The text fails to provide a specific plan to combat tax evasion by multinational companies and to...

Eurodad and the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development invite you to the conference “Fighting illicit flows from developing countries – what next for the EU agenda?” in Brussels on December 7^th and 8^th 2010. In the past few months, G20 leaders have expressed concern about the financial integrity of secrecy jurisdictions and the need to regulate them. In November 2009, they committed to ensuring that developing countries fully benefit from international measures to establish a more transparent and cooperative framework. In June 2010, EU Heads of State...

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...