Financial Transparency Coalition

Last week Christian Aid welcomed the G20′s bold pronouncements on tax havens, financial transparency and development. President Sarkozy went as far as to say that havens that didn’t comply would be excluded from the international community. A whole programme of work on tax and development was agreed. Our scorecard compares the recommendations made, with what the G20 actually delivered. The scores that we attribute to the G20 simply evaluate their response to that expert opinion.

Back in September I was sitting in the salubrious office of an official from one of International Financial Institutions – when he slouched back in his chair, sighed and said ‘I can’t even bear to read those G20 communiqués – they are so vacuous.’ That evening, I found myself at a dinner hosted by DC law firm Jones Day where former Mexican President Zedillo branded the G20 ‘a disappointment.’

About two weeks ago, I wrote about the “upward trajectory” of India’s stance on black money and transparency in international finance. I predicted that the country (eventually) would become a leader in this arena. In case you’ve missed India’s catapult into this discussion, here’s the background. In April of 2009, after becoming very upset by the evidence there are rivers of ‘black money’ flowing out of India, the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Rajnath Singh, told voters that if they elected his party into office he would, within 100 days, “bring back all the black money stashed in foreign...

Two prominent advocacy groups have released major reports last week exposing unsettling truths about bribery and tax dodging schemes among large corporations in the United States and around the world. Berlin-based Transparency International published its annual Bribe Payers Index on Tuesday, ranking 28 countries on the perceived likelihood of bribery within their companies, followed only days later by the Corporate Tax Payers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-2010 report by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.