Financial Transparency Coalition

The latest edition of TaxCast, the podcast produced by the Tax Justice Network, is out! In this edition, you'll hear about a tug of war between Switzerland and India for information on tax evaders, how Russian sanctions are affecting business in Europe, and much more.

Four years ago the Tax Justice Network wrote about FIFA’s so-called African “tax bubble” where FIFA was forcing a poor African country to forego its potential football tax revenues in order to funnel yet more money into FIFA’s gilded Zürich headquarters and its lucrative empire. We quoted Professor Han Kogels of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, who said:

“They want to create their own tax haven. A fully exempt situation. That is, FIFA and its FIFA subsidiaries that are fully exempt from any tax whatsoever levied at every level – state level, municipal level. All sorts of taxes: consumption taxes, income taxes...

While places like the Cayman Islands, Jersey, and the British Virgin Islands have begun entertaining the idea of public registers of beneficial ownership, today, they might have received the biggest nudge yet to move in that direction. But rather than come from civil society or advocacy groups, this time, the nudge comes all the way from 10 Downing Street.

This article originally appeared on the blog of the Tax Justice Network, a coordinating member of the Financial Transparency Coalition. This blogger used to live in South Africa, not long after the end of Apartheid, where one of the common refrains he heard was “I am not a racist, but . . . ” – usually