Financial Transparency Coalition

After a year of negotiations with Member States and the European Commission, and strong involvement by Eurodad and our partners, the European Parliament this week voted in favour of new accounting rules for extractive and logging sectors. The Accounting Directive will require companies in these two sectors to disclose their payments to governments in every country where they operate.

Since the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy, the OECD, and European leaders of the G8 have all committed to tackling tax havens, with a mixed record of successful reform. However, leading up to this week's meeting of the G8, David Cameron is calling for the organization's leaders to commit to addressing the global shadow financial system that has allowed illicit financial flows to stream into tax havens.

The summit between leaders of the world’s wealthiest economies will get underway next week in Northern Ireland. British Prime Minister David Cameron, leading the summit, has put three things at the top of his agenda: trade, tax, and transparency. There are a lot of issues directly relevant to the Financial Transparency Coalition in there, and I don’t have time to address them all, but one of the most promising, and interesting, is Cameron’s commitment to improving information on beneficial ownership of companies via public registries. Anonymity is prevalent under the world’s status quo. It is exceptionally easy (and relatively cheap)...

Canadians have about twice as much money squirreled away in tax havens as they did a decade ago, writes Tom Cardamone in the Canadian edition of The Huffington Post. With the G8 summit looming, will Canada's government support David Cameron's transparency reforms, including public registries of the true owners of companies?