Financial Transparency Coalition

As stuff.co.nz reports:

Tax haven activist Nicholas Shaxson has hit out at New Zealand for opposing a plan to create a UN body to tackle tax haven abuse. Shaxson, who has become famous following the publication of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, said New Zealand is letting down the developing world. He has also revealed that New Zealand has a growing reputation as an offshore haven itself. He predicts New Zealand will appear on the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index by 2013. In January, New Zealand’s permanent mission to the UN in New York said...

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...

The European presidency has just issued a note advocating a push to increase financial transparency in Europe through its Savings Tax Directive. As they say:

"The Presidency attaches crucial importance to gear up bilateral talks in order to reach political agreement upon the adoption of the Savings Tax Directive in the very near future."

Unsurprisingly, there are some rather large flies in this ointment. Austria and Luxembourg have long been holdouts on the European Savings Tax Directive, working hard behind...

Last week at the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, the African branch of Task Force coordinating committee member Tax Justice Network, Tax Justice Network - Africa (TJN-Africa), released the African edition of Tax Us If You Can. As Dereje Alemayehu, chair of Tax Justice Network's African Steering Committee, put it in a blog last week from Dakar:

This report is a clarion call to civil society and governments across Africa to stand up against the injustice of those who dodge taxes, and the response from those attending the launch was clear: this is an injustice we can no longer...