Financial Transparency Coalition

We are delighted to see this from Brazil's respected Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos (INESC,) which has launched a Brazilian (Portuguese-language) campaign, as part of our global End Tax Haven Secrecy (ETHS) initiative. The new site, Fim aos Paraísos Fiscais, is supported by a wide range of organisations and the launch got good media coverage in Brazil. Take a look at these reports, for example:

Indian finance minister Pranab Mukherjee called for international pressure to force non-cooperative jurisdictions to share information about the money they hide at an Asian Development Bank Governors’ seminar last week. This comes in the wake of a series of moves by India to crack down on the huge black money flows out of the country. Earlier in the year Mukherjee made similar comments in the build up to a meeting of G20 finance ministers, arguing for an “effective multilateral platform for automatic, spontaneous and requested exchange of information”. India also demonstrated its commitment to financial transparency by joining...

PARIS – With Ghana, Georgia and Nigeria joining in the past few weeks, the Global Forum on Transparency has now 101 members and expects more countries to join soon.

The international edition of the Financial Times has a comment by TJN's Nick Shaxson and John Christensen evaluating how far the G-20 countries have progressed towards their stated goal of tackling banking secrecy and tax havens. The title says it all: "Time to black-list the tax haven whitewash." In April 2009 British prime minister Gordon Brown, the then G-20 president, issued the following commitment:

"to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens. We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published...