Financial Transparency Coalition

When accused of abusive tax avoidance, the first words out of a mouth of a large-company CEO are usually, "We have a fiduciary responsibility to our shareholders to avoid taxes." According to a new opinion from Farrer & Co, a major law firm in the UK, that may not be the case. The opinion, which applies only to the United Kingdom, states, "It is not possible to construe a director's statutory obligation to promote the success of the company as a positive duty to avoid tax." FTC Coordinating Committee member Tax Justice Network will be sending a letter to each...

Video: Tax Justice Network's John Christensen on France24, speaking out the new book, "The Finance Curse."

Last year Itai Grinberg, Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center in the U.S., published an important paper entitled Beyond FATCA: An Evolutionary Moment for the International Tax System, providing a comprehensive overview of the emerging international architecture of financial transparency, with different models of information exchange (see below) jostling for supremacy.

In April 2013′s Taxcast: ‘offshore leaks’ blows the lid off secrecy for sale, the G20 endorse greater transparency (but let’s not get too excited), Luxembourg agrees to lift its banking secrecy, Austria next? And the Taxcast takes a look at fake foreign direct investment.