The United States has long relied on informal agreements with private sector institutions to assert its interests in the global financial system. If we are to fight kleptocracy, we need to make this privately run plumbing more accountable to international institutions, argues Edoardo Saravalle in … [Read more...]
Finance Sector
Systemic Corruption and the Oligarchic Threat to National Security
Attempts to tackle corruption have tended to work with a narrow, legalistic definition of the phenomenon, which leaves much that should concern us either out of focus or altogether invisible. In this guest blog, cross-posted from our recent edition of Tax Justice Focus on national security, Camila … [Read more...]
A reparational justice journey: the Tax Justice Network podcast, October 2020
In this episode of the Tax Justice Network’s monthly podcast, the Taxcast, we go on a reparational justice journey and speak to the Council for World Mission about their Legacies of Slavery project. Plus: austerity's out, public investment is now in?! We discuss the IMF's hypocritical turn around … [Read more...]
VIDEO: Winning the Fight for Tax Justice – how do we make multinationals pay?
Yes, we can build an open and transparent tax system that works fairly for everyone. Do you know how multinationals shift their profits to dodge their taxes and how we can stop them? Our beautifully illustrated new videos tell you how, narrated in five different languages by our tax justice podcast … [Read more...]
The Financial Infrastructure of Corruption
We recently published a special edition of Tax Justice Focus on national security, guest edited by Jack Blum, Charles Davidson and Ben Judah. You can read their editorial here. In the following article, Yakov Feygin from the Berggruen Institute, argues that the United States could and should use … [Read more...]
Tax havens harm our well-being and security
Image: NeoNazi_02″ by Chad Johnson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 This week we published a special edition of Tax Justice Focus on national security, guest edited by Jack Blum, Charles Davidson and Ben Judah. You can read their editorial here. In the coming days we will publish the five … [Read more...]
Offshore, National Security and Britain’s Role
Image: NeoNazi_02" by Chad Johnson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 The long recession precipitated by the 2008 financial crisis fed political failures across the world, increasing inequality and polarising societies to the point of social breakdown. As far-right movements threaten to take … [Read more...]
How GDP masks the finance curse
Every country needs a financial centre, but as it grows beyond a certain optimal size (where it is carrying out the functions it is supposed to do) it starts to harm the country that hosts it. That is the finance curse, and many countries including the United States and United Kingdom passed that … [Read more...]
Taking Panama to task: Women’s rights trampled by financial secrecy
Just over four years have passed since a huge archive of secret documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, containing wide-ranging details of fraud, tax evasion and other illegal financial schemes, were leaked to a German newspaper provoking a global scandal. The public outcry that … [Read more...]
Tax, reparations and ‘Plan B’ for the UK’s tax haven web
The killing of George Floyd by US police in Minnesota, on 25 May 2020, has sparked a public response both more powerful and more international than almost any of the previous cases in a very long line - including Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, 13 March 2020. The demands for justice extend far beyond … [Read more...]
Britain’s Slave Owner Compensation Loan, reparations and tax havenry
Update: you can hear Naomi Fowler and John Christensen discussing this research in edition 102 of the Taxcast, our monthly podcast, starting about 2 minutes in: It's hard to believe but it was only in 2015 that, according to the Treasury, British taxpayers finished 'paying off' the debt which … [Read more...]
Nixon-era laws have shaped western racism and protected ‘enablers’ of financial crimes
This guest blog written by Dr Mary Alice Young of the University of the West England proposes that in the aftermath of Covid-19, Western governments must redress antiquated and inherently racist organised crime control laws By Dr Mary Alice Young* Organised crime is not homogeneous, and is … [Read more...]
The Wall Street Climate Consensus
Last week we published the second part of our Tax Justice Focus special on climate crisis and tax justice. This blog reproduces the article contributed by economist Daniela Gabor*, in which she pinpoints the dangers of allowing private actors to take the lead in financing the … [Read more...]
A “world fit for money laundering” must end in the post Covid-19 era
We're sharing here the details of explosive new research on "the untold history of how prominent civil servants in the UK tailored US-devised anti-money laundering policies in ways that suited the needs of Britain’s financial services industry." This new research was carried out by our senior … [Read more...]
My billionaire bosses funnelled money offshore for years. Now they want a bailout
We're sharing this personal story from an anonymous writer who has been made redundant in the past month. The consequences of a world where we tolerated the excesses of so-called 'wealth creators' are becoming starkly clear as their lack of responsibility or loyalty to employees and to the society … [Read more...]
