Financial Transparency Coalition

I’m not going to get over-excited, I hope, but I think the new UK / Liechtenstein Tax Information Exchange Agreement moves information exchange into a new era. This deal is like no other Tax Information Exchange Agreement. Take this from the preamble:

The Government of the Principality of Liechtenstein and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (together “the Contracting Parties”) desiring to:

(a) regulate the exchange of information with respect to taxes between the Contracting Parties and facilitate tax cooperation and taxpayer assistance, and

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The OECD is holding a meeting of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information on September 1-2 in Los Cabos, Mexico. There are three objectives. The first is to discuss creating new ways of concluding Tax Information Exchange Agreements. The second is to decide whether the Cayman and St Kitts & Nevis legislation that allows unilateral information exchange is acceptable for information exchange purposes. The third is to set up a peer review monitoring group on information exchange. Documents on the first two agenda items are here. The document on monitoring is here.

Nick Shaxson and John Christenson at the Tax Justice Network have pointed out that a Luxembourg think tank, the Cercle de Coopération, has been forced to withdraw a report that it published which was critical of Luxembourg's status as a secrecy jurisdiction and highlighted the negative effect it had on developing countries. From the TJN blog:

The Cercle has made an extremely important step towards a public debate on tax issues that is long overdue. The study has prompted a furious reaction from various quarterse including, for obvious reasons, Luxembourg's finance industry,...