Financial Transparency Coalition

Early this morning in Switzerland, some of the most influential officials in the worldwide soccer body, FIFA, were probably waking up or getting ready for breakfast. What happened next was, most certainly, unannounced and unexpected.

What do you call an entity with huge amounts of money, a monopoly on a hugely popular good, and no transparency or accountability structure whatsoever? The answer is not a corporation or a corrupt dictator. It’s FIFA. FIFA (in French: Fédération Internationale de Football Association) has a long history of bribery, questionable profits, scandals, and shadowy deals. As Tax Justice Network has shown, the organization has created its own “tax bubble,” forcing nations out of tax revenue by negotiating tax exemption from all types of levies, including income and sales taxes. Christian Aid has, for example, shown that in the...

FTC coordinating member, Tax Justice Network just released June's edition of TaxCast, a monthly podcast covering tax and transparency issues from around the globe. This month's edition covers a wide range of topics, including Thomas Piketty's new book on wealth inequality, Capital in the 21st Century, FIFA's role as a temporary tax haven, and the OECD process towards automatic information exchange.

Four years ago the Tax Justice Network wrote about FIFA’s so-called African “tax bubble” where FIFA was forcing a poor African country to forego its potential football tax revenues in order to funnel yet more money into FIFA’s gilded Zürich headquarters and its lucrative empire. We quoted Professor Han Kogels of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, who said:

“They want to create their own tax haven. A fully exempt situation. That is, FIFA and its FIFA subsidiaries that are fully exempt from any tax whatsoever levied at every level – state level, municipal level. All sorts of taxes: consumption taxes, income taxes...