Financial Transparency Coalition

PARIS – With Ghana, Georgia and Nigeria joining in the past few weeks, the Global Forum on Transparency has now 101 members and expects more countries to join soon.

The international edition of the Financial Times has a comment by TJN's Nick Shaxson and John Christensen evaluating how far the G-20 countries have progressed towards their stated goal of tackling banking secrecy and tax havens. The title says it all: "Time to black-list the tax haven whitewash." In April 2009 British prime minister Gordon Brown, the then G-20 president, issued the following commitment:

"to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens. We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published...

PARIS (OECD) - Bulgaria should do more to prevent, report, detect and prosecute foreign bribery cases, according to a new report by the OECD Working Group on Bribery.

Back in 2009, when Task Force members began lobbying the UK government on what the G20’s crackdown on tax havens might look like, the response was that automatic exchange of information was cumbersome, difficult, that there was far too much information to be useful – and, to paraphrase, that it would end up being shipped around the world in boxes which would cause a fire hazard. But last week the UK parliament accepted the Draft Penalties, Offshore Income etc. (Designation of territories) Order 2011. This measure, designed to crack down on UK taxpayers holding assets offshore,...