Financial Transparency Coalition

PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Amid a growing worldwide movement for beneficial ownership transparency, Germany’s lower house of parliament passed a severely weakened bill on company ownership on Thursday night. The bill, meant to transpose the European Union Anti-Money Laundering Directive into German law, would keep the country’s register closed, only offering data to investigative

Over the last few months, an aid program (read: bailout) for Cyprus’ banks put together by EU rescuers has met mounting resistance among Europeans. The reason? Money laundering... and the alleged ties of Russian oligarchs to Cyprus’ banks. There does seem to be a questionable relationship there. Last fall, Der Spiegel reported on Germany's Federal Intelligence Service’s (BND) secret report on money laundering in Cyprus. According to Der Spiegel, the report finds that the people who would benefit most from a European bailout of Cyprus banks are Russian oligarchs, mafiosi, and businesspeople who have parked illegal earnings in the small...

An old industrial dynasty from the German Ruhr region might play a role in blasting the envisaged transparency regulations for the extractive industry proposed by the EU commission. It is one of those typical German Mittelstand (SME) family-owned businesses, which was founded in 1842 by Wilhelm Grillo, and grew into an industrial giant, the Grillo-Werke AG. The core competence on zinc, the company focuses on zinc metallurgy and sulphur chemistry, has an estimated annual turnover of around 600 million Euro, around 1600 employees and is headed by Ulrich Grillo.

The Tax Justice Network has blogged repeatedly on the thoroughly toxic and dangerous tax deals that Switzerland has signed with Germany and the UK and others and is seeking to expand as a model to other countries. We have demonstrated on several occasions that the deals - which are supposed to apply withholding taxes on secret assets, in exchange for continued anonymity - are all but worthless, from a technical point of view (that is, they are absolutely riddled with loopholes, and will raise only a fraction of the promised sums; we have sent our detailed analysis to tax...