Financial Transparency Coalition

Much as expected, the Foot report into the Crown Dependencies and the Overseas Territories is disappointing. Appoint the wrong man to do the job – and Michael Foot was always the wrong man to do this job – and he has even defected to the Tories whilst undertaking it in an extraordinary show of poor etiquette – and you will get the wrong answers. How could a man who makes his living from offshore have ever done this job? But the report, none the less seeks to delivers some small punches. It is, for example, adamant...

I’ve written more words on secrecy jurisdictions than most. I’m credited by some with defining the term. Now the research project on secrecy jurisdictions on which I have been working with a small but first rate team from the Tax Justice Network (Markus Meinzer, John Christensen and Paul Sagar) has delivered its first output. That output is on secrecyjurisdictions.com. You could pass an hour or two there easily: actually, rather more than that as this is, almost without doubt, the biggest database on secrecy jurisdictions ever built. There are something like 1,800 pages of data on the site...

Today the Tax Justice Network launches a major new project called Mapping the Faultlines, backed by research funding from the Ford Foundation. This has been the biggest and most elaborate research effort ever undertaken to look at how secrecy operates through global financial markets. As the project brief notes, it is intended to complement work by Global Financial Integrity in Washington, D.C., looking at the magnitudes of these problems. While putting together this material, which would run to more than 1,800 pages if printed, we have felt like explorers charting territory previously mapped in only the scantiest...

Ngozi Ikonjo-Iweala is MD of the World Bank. She’s spoken here and is saying that the importance of the issue we’re talking about – illicit financial flows – has not yet struck home. It’s time for it to take centre stage. She has directly endorsed action. Direct action, on the street, she says. She’s directly thanked the small coterie of us from civil society who are working on this issue – and has said this is the #1 issue for civil society and development now. There must be, she says, people on the streets demanding change. Placards are needed. And we must...