Financial Transparency Coalition

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgium has been removed from a "grey list" of countries seen as lacking financial transparency after it signed 12 agreements with other countries to exchange tax-related information, the OECD said on Thursday.

Chairman of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Working Group on Bribery in International Business Transactions, Mark Pieth raised an appeal against a Swiss bank to release $6million in assets belonging to former DR Congo’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Sisoko, to DR Congo, but the court rather ruled the looted money to the late dictator’s family.

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday said that New Delhi has initiated a dialogue with Swiss authorities to obtain information on Indian black money stashed away in banks there — an issue that had raised much political heat during the elections with BJP leader L K Advani making it a major poll plank.

Apparently nobody at Reuters read my post yesterday about the media's skewed coverage of the OECD grey list and the signing of TIEAs. I wrote regarding the media's coverage of Luxembourg coming off the OECD grey-list:

But there is an entirely separate side to this story that hasn’t permeated the coverage at all: the OECD standards are useless in any practical sense, and under these standards wealthy tax evaders will still feel perfectly safe stashing their money in Luxembourg. As we discuss extensively on this website – the OECD’s standards require a...