Financial Transparency Coalition

The issue of stolen assets and their management, or lack of adequate management, by the global financial system is a component of the broader issue of illicit money and how it flows through the financial system to be transformed into licit, “usable” money. This physical process, often referred to as money laundering – a sort of modern alchemy, it is important for anyone to understand who is genuinely concerned with the fight against political or business corruption. In order to be successful at fighting corrupt practices, we need to know what these practices are and which ones work and which...

Oxfam International has released a new report calling on the G20 to make the connection between secrecy jurisdictions and the harm they do to developing countries. Section 5 of the report states:

All countries should be able to generate their own income by promoting fair taxation. Yet currently, many countries are constrained in their attempts to raise resources domestically or to apply appropriate tariffs because of problems in the international system. At the G20 London Summit in 2009, leaders promised to stand together against tax evasion and avoidance. The G20 should honour its commitments to tackle the tax havens that...

NEW DELHI: Ahead of G20 meet in South Korea, think-tank Oxfam said the bloc of 20 countries should devise methods to tackle tax havens, so that the interest of developing nations could be protected.

We have been reading occasional stories about the foreclosure mess in the United States. For those who don't know about it, here is a quick summary, to start with. In the run-up to the financial crisis that erupted in 2007, banks and other financial institutions packaged up bundles of mortgages into entities which were then themselves diced up and sold on, once or more than once, to other investors, in a process known as securitisation. The chain of ownership between houseowner and the ultimate holder of the mortgage risk often involved many links,...