Financial Transparency Coalition

Indian finance minister Pranab Mukherjee called for international pressure to force non-cooperative jurisdictions to share information about the money they hide at an Asian Development Bank Governors’ seminar last week. This comes in the wake of a series of moves by India to crack down on the huge black money flows out of the country. Earlier in the year Mukherjee made similar comments in the build up to a meeting of G20 finance ministers, arguing for an “effective multilateral platform for automatic, spontaneous and requested exchange of information”. India also demonstrated its commitment to financial transparency by joining...

Last month, the Secretary General of the OECD, Angel Gurría, came to Washington, and among his appointments was a public talk at the Center for Global Development (where he is a member of the board of directors). A former finance minister and foreign minister for Mexico, Sr. Gurría was every bit the politician and statesman – smiling, good projection and eye contact, very personable and very optimistic – hardly a negative word was mentioned about himself or the OECD. Secretary General Gurría began his talk with a brief summary of the world economy. He noted that the center of...

PARIS – With Ghana, Georgia and Nigeria joining in the past few weeks, the Global Forum on Transparency has now 101 members and expects more countries to join soon.

The international edition of the Financial Times has a comment by TJN's Nick Shaxson and John Christensen evaluating how far the G-20 countries have progressed towards their stated goal of tackling banking secrecy and tax havens. The title says it all: "Time to black-list the tax haven whitewash." In April 2009 British prime minister Gordon Brown, the then G-20 president, issued the following commitment:

"to take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens. We stand ready to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems. The era of banking secrecy is over. We note that the OECD has today published...