Financial Transparency Coalition

In September at the turn of this century, the leaders of the world convened at the Millennium Assembly of the United Nations. The Assembly was the culmination of nearly a decade of United Nations summits and conferences to address development and poverty. It was 2000, however, that the world’s leaders adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, a commitment to a noble new partnership to drastically reduce poverty worldwide. All 193 member states of the United Nations and 23 organizations agreed to achieve a set of eight goals by 2015. They are: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; ...

Action Aid is right to highlight the problem with the UK’s reform of the so called ‘controlled foreign company rules’. I explained this issue for the TUC in June last year on pages 20 – 25 here. The abuse these changes in the rules will allow is real. The cost will be as big as Action Aid estimates. And that, in itself, simply adds to the tax abuse to the poorest countries of the world by the richest corporations in the world.

At its annual conference last week, the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development identified concrete measures that could help developing countries to mobilise the resources needed to achieve the Millennium Developing Goals (MDGs) and go even further to help eradicate world poverty and lay the ground for a fairer global financial system. These measures include:

• taxing the USD 15 to 20 trillion of private wealth sitting in tax havens
• establishing accounting standards that oblige multinational companies to report their profits earned in every country
• or setting rules for the automatic exchange of tax information between countries.

The Task Force...