About Andres Knobel
Costa Rica: a bill threatening to render its beneficial ownership register useless
Costa Rica has been at the vanguard of beneficial ownership registration in Latin America and the world. The country approved its beneficial ownership registration law 9416 in December 2016 and continued to strengthen the robustness of its beneficial ownership registration requirements since then, as recognised by the 2018 and 2020 editions of the Financial Secrecy Index. A new bill making
Read the full article…FATF beneficial ownership report reveals cutting-edge verification processes, hesitates to endorse public registries
Coauthors: Andres Knobel, Markus Meinzer and Moran Harari The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) which evaluates countries on their compliance with its anti-money laundering recommendations recently published a report on best practices of beneficial ownership for legal persons, leaving trusts aside. The report contains interesting examples of countries doing exactly what our paper on beneficial ownership verification proposed, but misses
Read the full article…The quadrillion-dollar elephant in the room: beneficial ownership in the investment industry
Read and share your comments on the Tax Justice Network’s new working paper on beneficial ownership and investment funds, available to download here. The paper proposes new transparency measures since neither beneficial ownership registries or the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard (CRS) for automatic exchange of information are sufficient to address the secrecy created by investment funds and financial assets. After
Read the full article…Not just about control: one share in a company should be enough to be a beneficial owner
We have written a lot about beneficial ownership registration, definitions, thresholds, complex structures, verification and so on. However, there seems to be a philosophical confusion about who should be considered to be (and registered as) a beneficial owner for a company, and what the consequences of that should be. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in charge of anti-money laundering
Read the full article…Global Asset Registries: a game changer for the fight against inequality and illicit financial flows?
In July a workshop was held at the Paris School of Economics to start developing the concept for a Global Asset Registry. In essence, the point of a Global Asset Registry is to understand (and then tackle) some of the most pressing issues of our times: inequality, and financial crime. The Moldovan Laundromat; the bigger Russian Laundromat; the “Luxleaks” corporate
Read the full article…More beneficial ownership loopholes to plug: circular ownership, fragmented control and companies as parties to the trust
Beneficial ownership transparency has been defined as a key tool to tackle tax abuse, money laundering, corruption and the financing of terrorism among other illicit financial flows. It involves identifying the individuals (“beneficial owners”) who ultimately own, control or benefit from companies, partnerships, trusts and any other type of legal vehicles. As described in our briefing on the state of
Read the full article…We trained over 100 tax administration officials to use our Indexes
The Tax Justice Network has been cooperating for years with the Inter-American Center of Tax Administrations (CIAT) to train, learn from and share knowledge with tax administrations on tax abuse mechanisms and what can be done to curtail them. At CIAT’s International Taxation Network Meeting in Antigua, Guatemala on October 2018, the Tax Justice Network presented the different tools we
Read the full article…Protecting enablers: attorney-client privilege is just the tip of the iceberg in facilitating illicit financial flows
A recent US case gives timid hope after unlimited attorney-client privilege in relation to tax cheating. But is this enough? Is the real issue being addressed? We’ve paid a lot of attention to “enablers” – that is, the bankers, accountants, lawyers, and others who put together the system of global financial secrecy that underpins a world of crime and abuse.
Read the full article…US half-shuts door to financial secrecy, opens new window
The US is the world’s second greatest contributor to global financial secrecy, according to the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index, only faring better than Switzerland in complicity in enabling financial secrecy schemes that foster tax abuse, money laundering and the financing of terrorism. With all of the US’s major transparency shortcomings – eg no participation in global automatic exchange
Read the full article…SWIFT data can be a global vantage point for tackling global money laundering
The Tax Justice Network has published today a proposal on how to use SWIFT data on bank transfers to detect money laundering schemes. Download the report here. While many people are rightfully concerned about the serious risks for money laundering raised by new cryptocurrencies, banks and financial institutions that have been around for decades and centuries – and have been
Read the full article…Dear WEF, let’s tax corporations in the real world
I was invited to speak yesterday at the World Economic Forum’s seminar on “Digitalization and International Economic Policy: Tax, Competition, Trade and Investment”. Also invited to speak were Director of Global Tax Policy at IBM Linda Evans, Head of Tax Policy at KPMG Chris Morgan and Fellow at the Council on Economic Policies Agustin Redonda. We spoke about tax policies
Read the full article…Statistics on automatic exchange of banking information and the right to hold authorities (and banks) to account
New publications in the US, the UK, Switzerland and Japan show that better statistics on cross-border exchanges of financial information are possible and necessary to hold governments and financial institutions accountable. Large amounts of financial information are now being shared automatically across borders, to allow countries to find out where their (mostly wealthy) taxpayers have stashed their wealth and what
Read the full article…Global Asset Registry workshop – 1-2 July, Paris: submit your paper
The Global Asset Registry workshop in Paris on July 1st and 2nd, 2019 is by invitation only. We will of course share the fruits of the workshop as we develop them further, but for now participation during Day 1 is open to anyone whose paper has been accepted. You can submit your proposal and original, high-quality papers to present at
Read the full article…The use of banking information to tackle corruption and money laundering: a low-hanging fruit the OECD refuses to harvest
Imagine that the OECD set up a global system of rules for exchanging apples across borders, so that everyone can enjoy apples of different tastes. Apple eaters were delighted. But then someone asked if the apples could be used to make apple juice. “Stop!” the OECD said. “The apples are only authorised for eating, not drinking!” Fiction? Yes – although
Read the full article…Call for papers: the Global Asset Registry workshop – Paris, 1-2 July
Wealth inequality poses serious risks to economies, to societies more broadly, and to the functioning of democracies. And yet the actual magnitude of wealth inequality is unknown because of the deep financial secrecy that surrounds it. Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, called for a Global Asset Registry to ensure that policymakers and the public had access
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