Financial Transparency Coalition

As The Guardian reports this morning:

More than a third of the subsidiaries owned by major energy and mining companies including Shell, BP and Glencore are based in “secrecy jurisdictions” where company accounts are not publicly available, according to a report. The study by Publish What You Pay Norway, which campaigns for transparent accounting among oil, gas and mining giants, claims that populations in resource-rich countries are losing out because they are unable to extract financial information from businesses operating on their soil or off their seaboards. “Extractive industry giants’ corporate ownership structures, their use of secrecy jurisdictions and the...

On September 9th the Cayman Islands introduced a bill for the establishment of new Special Economic Zones. The most Alice-in-Wonderland part of the bill is this bit, on page 14:

"A special economic zone shall be deemed to be outside of the Islands and not in the Islands."

Emphasis added. So where will this zone be? It seems that it will, for the relevant purposes, effectively be 'elsewhere' - which, in practical terms, means 'nowhere.' This 'it's elsewhere, don't-blame-us, we-can't-regulate-this' approach is what a lot of the activity of secrecy jurisdictions is designed to do - it's not so common,...

PARIS – Furthering efforts to fight against international tax evasion and bank secrecy, members of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes have issued 12 new peer review reports.

LONDON – Transparency of Libya’s oil wealth must be a key priority of Thursday’s negotiations over the country’s future, said Global Witness today. The meeting, which is to be co-chaired by UK Prime Minister David Cameron and France’s President, Nicholas Sarkozy, could mark a crucial step along the path to future peace and prosperity in Libya.