Financial Transparency Coalition

Financial Secrecy Index – the G20’s broken promise October 4, 2011. Today we launch our 2011 Financial Secrecy Index, the biggest investigation of global financial secrecy in world history. It combines a secrecy score with a weighting to create a ranking of the countries that most aggressively provide secrecy in global finance. The new FSI, which follows our inaugural index of 60 jurisdictions published in 2009, considers 73 jurisdictions to reveal a world where most of the biggest suppliers of secrecy are either OECD countries, EU members, or their dependencies. Britain plays an especially prominent role. Secrecy is alive and well World...

On the 22 September, the Committee for Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) in the European Parliament passed a report containing both concrete measures and broader statements against the race to the bottom in European corporate taxation, citing the financial strain this is placing on European countries and their citizens. The EU is currently revising the parent-subsidiary directive, with the intention of preventing double or multiple taxation when the profits of a subsidiary are distributed to the parent company or companies. Too often such treaties effectively lead to double-non taxation. To address this the MEPs voted for an amendment to...

WASHINGTON – The world’s most powerful countries may be about to renege on their pledges to help developing nations fight massive tax dodging by multinationals, Christian Aid is warning.

As The Guardian reports this morning:

More than a third of the subsidiaries owned by major energy and mining companies including Shell, BP and Glencore are based in “secrecy jurisdictions” where company accounts are not publicly available, according to a report. The study by Publish What You Pay Norway, which campaigns for transparent accounting among oil, gas and mining giants, claims that populations in resource-rich countries are losing out because they are unable to extract financial information from businesses operating on their soil or off their seaboards. “Extractive industry giants’ corporate ownership structures, their use of secrecy jurisdictions and the...