Financial Transparency Coalition

Lately, we've had quite a few reasons to get outraged as global citizens, especially when looking at the financial system, which seems all too well rigged in favor of a small, wealthy elite. We've learned of secret tax deals undoubtedly concocted in ominously tall office buildings between some of the worlds biggest companies and a tax haven; and we've also learned of billions of dollars that were being held by a Swiss bank by the world's wealthiest, amid claims that the bank was helping many of these people...

The European Commission’s new measures to combat secret tax deals made between multinational companies and governments cannot be called tax transparency, as they fail to give citizens access to any information.  The Tax Transparency Package, published today in response to the Luxembourg Leaks scandal, makes some improvements to the information that tax administrations receive, but keeps tax rulings confidential, denying proper public scrutiny of governments’ tax administrations and large companies.  Tove Ryding, Head of Tax Justice at the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), said: “This is not tax...

The lux leaks saga moved up a couple of gears last week. First of all, a large number of MEPs broke ranks with their leadership to publicly back a European Parliament committee of enquiry into the so-called ‘sweetheart deals’ that Luxembourg concluded with hundreds of multinational companies to minimise their tax bill. The Parliament’s political decision-making body, the Conference of Presidents, has yet to formally approve the enquiry but the genie seems to be well and truly out of the bottle now, even if there are reports that EPP deputies are being put under pressure to withdraw their signatures.  The enquiry...

Fittingly on International Anti-Corruption Day, more than 40 investigative journalists from all over the world signed a letter urging Jean Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, and other legislators to finish what the European Parliament started in March: the creation of public registers of company ownership information. The proposed reform, currently being debated under a new anti-money laundering directive, would create registers to collect information on the real, human owner behind every company operating in the EU. Right now, it's all too easy to set up an anonymous company and use it for money laundering,...