Financial Transparency Coalition

The Financial Secrecy Index is the Tax Justice Network’s flagship index of secrecy jurisdictions, or ‘tax havens’. The idea emerged from discussions at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, in January 2007. In part, it came from frustration with a popular view of corruption as a ‘poor country’ problem – when all the analysis of

The corporate income tax is under attack. Nation states are scrambling to offer multinational corporations an ever growing feast of lower taxes, loopholes and incentives. Lobbyists and politicians constantly try to persuade us that the corporate tax is a bad, inefficient, unreasonable tax. Yet it is one of the most precious of all taxes. One of our ten points concerns revenue. Corporate income taxes have added up to almost US$ 7.5 trillion since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, in OECD countries alone. This is nearly half of all OECD public health spending and around double the amount spent...

We are delighted to issue a call to journalists and campaigners to attend the fifth Illicit Finance Journalism Programme. TJN’s financial investigative journalism training course takes place in London between Tuesday 12 May – Friday 15 May 2015 at City University London, Northampton Square, EC1V 0HB. This course is aimed at practicing journalists who have an interest in investigating business and the flow of money. Experience in financial reporting is an advantage but not a prerequisite. Class instructions will take place in English. There are bursaries for journalists from...

We are big fans of human rights organisations, generally speaking, but we’re going to say some uncomfortable things about some of them here. Yesterday we noted that Rudolf Elmer, the Swiss whistleblower who has been persecuted for years by the Swiss tax haven industry, via the Swiss courts and other arms of Swiss state, collapsed in court during a trial where he is accused of breaking Swiss banking secrecy laws. He has already spent five months in prison and he faces more: read the background here. The Swiss establishment and media has mostly focused on Elmer the...