Financial Transparency Coalition

This image comes from the Hindustan Times. I’m reproducing it. It shows just how important the British Overseas Territories are to the City of London and the tax abuse it promotes. And remember, it misses off the Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

Reuters recently released the second feature in Shell Games, a series "exploring the extent and impact of corporate secrecy in the United States." The first special report in the series, "A little house of secrets on the Great Plains" dealt with shell companies established in Wyoming, generally recognized as a secrecy jurisdiction, and how some have been used to hide illict assets . The newest report, "China's shortcut to Wall Street" details how the reverse-merger process has allowed many Chinese companies to become publicly traded in the U.S., while bypassing many regulatory controls. The article details the process:

A couple of weeks ago I presented evidence to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee. My evidence will be published shortly. This week Dave Hartnett also gave evidence to that committee, and at least in part on the same subject: employee benefit trusts. As Accountancy Age reports:

told the Lords Economic Affairs Finance Bill Sub-Committee: “Some of the offshore arrangements have been pretty opaque to us for some time.”

Hartnett said: “It is not always possible to use the exchange of information provisions under treaties and other things to expose those.”

The disclosure regime had...

(Reuters) - Over the past year, the number of countries on an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development "gray list" of tax havens that have not fully implemented internationally agreed upon tax standards has dropped to 17 from more than 40.