Financial Transparency Coalition

Yaoundé, Cameroon, sits at the heart of Central Africa. The region is rich with mineral and forestry wealth which has been exploited ruthlessly by colonial powers and powerful corporations for centuries. You need only read the short historical paragraph on Yaoundé's Wikipedia entry to get a sense of this past and present intrusion by external powers. Much of Central Africa's wealth disappears offshore, and constant exploitation has exposed the region to deep rooted political and commercial corruption. This is the context in which tax justice researchers and campaigners...

Tax Research LLP and the Tax Justice Network have made a joint submission to the European Commission this morning on their consultation on the future of the Transparency Directive. The full submission is here. The summary says:

This submission addresses issues of opacity within the financial reporting of multinational corporations quoted on stock exchanges which we believe should be addressed by revision to the European Union’s Transparency Directive. We focus in particular on these issues: 1. The current opacity regarding ownership of such multinational corporations; 2. The opacity regarding the structure of such multinational corporations; 3. The...

I’ve written more words on secrecy jurisdictions than most. I’m credited by some with defining the term. Now the research project on secrecy jurisdictions on which I have been working with a small but first rate team from the Tax Justice Network (Markus Meinzer, John Christensen and Paul Sagar) has delivered its first output. That output is on secrecyjurisdictions.com. You could pass an hour or two there easily: actually, rather more than that as this is, almost without doubt, the biggest database on secrecy jurisdictions ever built. There are something like 1,800 pages of data on the site...

Today the Tax Justice Network launches a major new project called Mapping the Faultlines, backed by research funding from the Ford Foundation. This has been the biggest and most elaborate research effort ever undertaken to look at how secrecy operates through global financial markets. As the project brief notes, it is intended to complement work by Global Financial Integrity in Washington, D.C., looking at the magnitudes of these problems. While putting together this material, which would run to more than 1,800 pages if printed, we have felt like explorers charting territory previously mapped in only the scantiest...