Financial Transparency Coalition

The European presidency has just issued a note advocating a push to increase financial transparency in Europe through its Savings Tax Directive. As they say:

"The Presidency attaches crucial importance to gear up bilateral talks in order to reach political agreement upon the adoption of the Savings Tax Directive in the very near future."

Unsurprisingly, there are some rather large flies in this ointment. Austria and Luxembourg have long been holdouts on the European Savings Tax Directive, working hard behind...

David McNair of Christian Aid has an article on Comment is Free at the Guardian this morning. Talking about the proposed tax agreement with Switzerland he says:

The government might call it pragmatism but its talks with Switzerland, about how to tackle the £100bn or so which Britons have hidden in Swiss bank accounts, suggest that it is suffering from both naivety and a severe case of beggar-thy-neighbour. What the two governments have said is that they will try to do a deal to give the UK some of the tax that its...

From Bruno Gurtner, guest editor. Tax Justice Focus, Volume 6, Number 2 – The SWITZERLAND edition. October 5th, 2010 The Switzerland edition - click here The latest edition of Tax Justice Focus explores the changing face of tax haven Switzerland. Historically one of the world’s most important secrecy jurisdictions, Switzerland – along with its financial services sector – has recently been buffetted by a series of scandals and pressures. These range from a giant tax evasion probe in the United States targetting the Swiss bank UBS, to massive damage to the banks from the ...

On Monday, amid much fanfare, Switzerland signed a revised double tax treaty with India, concerning exchange of information between the two jurisdictions (for general background on what tax treaties and TIEAs are, see here.) Recently, we blogged Indian concerns about the OECD's standard of information exchange, and we have written extensively on the OECD standards themselves, calling them woefully inadequate and noting that they are emphtically not, as the OECD likes to assert, the "internationally accepted standard." It may be a sign of the pressures that developing countries are under that...