Financial Transparency Coalition

TJN has repeatedly reported about Switzerland’s devious strategy of breaking the European Union’s thrust for a functioning system of automatic information exchange. The Swiss Finance Ministry, in conjunction with its banks, deployed a strategy to fence off the dawning end of financial secrecy, called the “final withholding tax”. It is designed to preserve banking secrecy while buying off noise-making foreign governments through the transfer of a final tax on foreign citizens’ financial account’s income (details here). The German-language Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger reported on spokespersons of the German and Swiss Finance Ministries signalling their willingness to soon...

If I told you that while the United States is engaged in a costly war against illegal drugs and the vicious cartels that traffic them, U.S. banks are willfully flouting U.S. and Mexican laws and helping these cartels launder their money, would you believe me? For decades the U.S. has served as a safe haven for the ill-gotten finances of corrupt foreign leaders and their ilk. Former foreign government ministers, military leaders, and corrupt heads of state have mansions, businesses, and bank accounts here. The banks who facilitate much of these activities are required by law to conduct...

ISTANBUL – State Secretary Ingrid Fiskaa spoke at the Fourth UN Conference on the LDCs, identifying illicit financial flows due to trade mispricing, tax evasion, trafficking, the drugs and arms trade, and corruption as one of the structural causes of poverty as well as one of the major threats facing sustainable development, along with climate change, armed conflicts, and a lack of political and economic empowerment for women and girls.

WASHINGTON, DC – The U.S. Treasury Department will hold a hearing tomorrow on a proposed rule requiring banks to report information to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on bank accounts held by non-U.S. residents. Currently, U.S. banks are not required to give the U.S. government information about these types of accounts.