Financial Transparency Coalition

Economics is the art of reading tea leaves while taking refuge behind numbers. This truth appears to be increasingly fashionable in the West as the ‘global’ financial crisis transpires to be a western financial and economic crisis. A recent IMF paper entitled “What Caused the Global Financial Crisis - Evidence on the Drivers of Financial Imbalances 1999 – 2007” is a welcome contribution to the tea leaf reading jamboree. It has been argued that low interest rates in the US were perhaps the most important root cause for the ensuing financial frenzy. This IMF paper does not deny this theory,...

As the Mail on Sunday reports yesterday:

When Barclays boss Bob Diamond confirmed that the bank had about 300 subsidiaries in tax havens there were gasps of dismay at a Treasury Select Committee hearing earlier this month. Few at the highly charged meeting would have believed such a vast network of offshore companies existed, potentially allowing the bank and its clients to avoid huge sums in tax. They would still be in the dark had MP Chuka Umunna not put the figure to Diamond in the first place. But a Financial Mail investigation can reveal that Barclays’ Byzantine structure is far...

The following answer to a written question has been published by the States of Jersey today:

WRITTEN QUESTION TO THE CHIEF MINISTER BY THE DEPUTY OF ST. MARY ANSWER TO BE TABLED ON TUESDAY 18th JANUARY 2011 Question Can the Chief Minister inform members how many Tax Information Exchange Agreements were in force at the beginning of 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010? Can he further tell members, for each of those years, how many requests for information have been received, from how many countries they were received, and in how many cases was the information requested found and...

Bob Diamond was before the Treasury Select Committee Tuesday. Chuka Umunna, MP fr Streatham, was one of those questioning him. And as the Daily Mail notes, he tabled some new evidence on the use of tax havens / secrecy jurisdictions by Barclays: I admit I spoke to Chuka’s office about this before the event, suggesting how they might find this data from the annual return forms of the bank.