Financial Transparency Coalition

Financial Secrecy Index – the G20’s broken promise October 4, 2011. Today we launch our 2011 Financial Secrecy Index, the biggest investigation of global financial secrecy in world history. It combines a secrecy score with a weighting to create a ranking of the countries that most aggressively provide secrecy in global finance. The new FSI, which follows our inaugural index of 60 jurisdictions published in 2009, considers 73 jurisdictions to reveal a world where most of the biggest suppliers of secrecy are either OECD countries, EU members, or their dependencies. Britain plays an especially prominent role. Secrecy is alive and well World...

Congratulations to Professor Prem Sikka, a senior adviser to the Tax Justice Network, for his extraordinary success on the case of Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Information on the investigation into BCCI, that was previously withheld from the public by the UK government, has now been released. Prem has fought a legal battle for five years so that missing information in the "Sandstorm Report" could be made publicly available. The case of BCCI, (referred to by many as "Bank of Crooks and Commerce International"), is possibly the biggest banking fraud in history. BCCI is a story of massive-scale Continue Reading

On p28 of the UK edition of Treasure Islands, I write: Almost no official estimates of the damage exist. The Brussels-based non-governmental organisation Eurodad has a book called Global Development Finance: Illicit flows Report 2009 which seeks to lay out, over a hundred pages, every comprehensive official estimate of global illicit international financial flows. Every page is blank. It’s a gimmick, but an important and telling gimmick. (Take a look at the picture: if you’re interested, the book’s cover looks like this). Now, for something I wrote yesterday on the TJN blog:

In a piece titled Dirty Money: Why does the international banking system make it so easy for corruption to flourish?, the People & Power series on Al Jazeera reports on kleptocrats, grand scale corruption, and the ease of channelling dirty money through the secrecy mechanisms of the global financial system, Again, let's drive the point home here, we're talking secrecy - we are not disputing rights to due privacy - we are talking the kind of secrecy that allows criminals and tax cheats to profit with impunity, and to lead privileged...