Financial Transparency Coalition

In the October 2013 Taxcast: Swiss villagers send some of profit shifting mining giant GlencoreXstrata’s money to humanitarian projects, tax havens do some window dressing and how many sets of accounts does a multinational corporation REALLY need to file their tax returns? The David and Goliath story of tax collection – even for the United States.

Stealing Africa, a documentary in the series Why Poverty that focuses on the case of the international mining giant Glencore in Zambia, is a must-watch for anyone concerned with domestic resource mobilization, global poverty, the resource curse, or illicit financial flows. These topics mesh together to one simple idea: money that should be staying in Africa's poorest nations is in fact fleeing at an astounding rate, and something needs to be done about it.

LONDON - Global Witness is today calling on Glencore to explain potentially corrupt deals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and is calling on the company to provide more details about its relationship with an Israeli businessman who is key to its substantial mining investments in the country. The concerns, detailed in a briefing for Glencore’s shareholders, are being published on the day of the company’s first AGM as a publicly listed company.

As The Guardian reports this morning:

More than a third of the subsidiaries owned by major energy and mining companies including Shell, BP and Glencore are based in “secrecy jurisdictions” where company accounts are not publicly available, according to a report. The study by Publish What You Pay Norway, which campaigns for transparent accounting among oil, gas and mining giants, claims that populations in resource-rich countries are losing out because they are unable to extract financial information from businesses operating on their soil or off their seaboards. “Extractive industry giants’ corporate ownership structures, their use of secrecy jurisdictions and the...