Financial Transparency Coalition

Citizens for Tax Justice's (CTJ) weekly Tax Justice Digest links the Google tax avoidance scandal to last week's revelation that multinational corporations are lobbying for a tax amnesty to repatriate billions of US$ "trapped" offshore: the lobbying by Multinationals for a tax amnesty. From CTJ:

Corporate lobbyists are once again asking Congress and the Obama administration for a tax amnesty for "repatriated" offshore profits. U.S. corporations that shifted profits offshore would get to bring that money back to the U.S. without paying the corporate income tax at the normal statutory rate of 35...

From Switzerland's Le Temps newspaper this morning (translated from the French)

The Ticino lawyer Fabrizio Pessina, from Chiasso, was arrested at Malpensa airport (Milan) on March 2 on his return from Spain where he had been playing golf. The financial brigade was interested in him, in the context of an investigation into two Italian businessmen suspected of diverting funds from a real estate project in Milan. On Fabrizio Pessina's personal computers the investigators found, it seems by chance, a list of 552 Italian taxpayers with the details of their bank accounts, including the names of their...