Financial Transparency Coalition

The G20, as anyone who is familiar with the slow moving tendencies of international organizations will attest to, has taken quite awhile to get behind the idea of cracking down on tax havens and fighting illicit financial flows from both developed and developing countries. The G20 initially recognized these issues as a problem for the internet national community to do something them in early 2009, but it took a slow evolution of statements over the three years for that recognition to be fully fleshed out into concrete actions and orders.

Most attention at this week’s G20 summit focused on the euro crisis and the perilous state of the global economy. But the G20’s final communiqué and background papers indicate that financial transparency is integral to its high-level agenda. The communiqué from Mexico highlighted 13 jurisdictions that have failed to meet the required standards of tax information exchange.

It’s not often that the G20, the summit of the leaders of the world’s biggest economies, is merely a preamble to a European meeting. But this week it is. When the world’s leaders met in Los Cabos, Mexico they had one thing on their mind: Europe. And while the leaders of the G20 had a lot to say about the European debt crisis, the real test, and the real action, will happen in Brussels next week, where we expect the European Council to agree to an action plan. In Mexico, European leaders hinted at how this plan might look: a...

Lisa Ann Elges of Task Force coordinating committee member Transparency International praised the latest draft of the G20's "Future We Want" document on Monday for including a goal of anti-corruption. Indeed, as climate change becomes a greater problem that requires mobilization of finances, the current level of corruption will threaten any form of assistance, aid, and prevention. After the 2009 cyclone Aila, for instance, Khadija Begum of Bangladesh complained to Transparency International that the builders constructing her new home, financed by foreign aid, sold the iron and concrete they were given and, instead, constructed a wall-less home of tin...