From Corporate Observatory Europe, the basic background for our guest blog: "The proposed EU legislation on “Trade Secrets Protection”, which the European Parliament will vote next April 14, creates excessive rights to secrecy for businesses: it is a direct threat to the work of journalists and … [Read more...]
Enablers and intermediaries
Panama: the making of a tax haven and rogue state
Panama is attracting much media attention at the moment, and for good reason. Earlier this month we blogged on a BBC Hard Talk interview with Panama's Vice President which referred to our comment that Panama gives "the middle finger" to the rest of the world when it comes to tackling financial … [Read more...]
Switzerland rejects request from Argentina on leaked HSBC accounts
From Argentina's La Nacion newspaper: "Switzerland has denied the Argentine judicial authorities information about 4,000 or so Argentine-owned bank accounts in Switzerland, saying that Argentina's request had no solid foundation." This concerns data revealed by an HSBC whistleblower, Hervé … [Read more...]
Following the Money: French Banks’ Activities in Tax Havens
Update: the English version is coming soon; the French version is here. The following press release is published by Oxfam France; CCFD-Terre Solidaire; and Secours Catholique-Caritas. The accompanying study uses the first fully available public Country-by-Country reporting data from French banks … [Read more...]
KPMG: are they really masters of the universe?
A guest blog by Atul Shah of Suffolk Business School. Also published at Tax Research. Are KPMG really masters of the universe? The growing size and influence of Big 4 global accounting firms, and their supermarket of business consulting and advisory services, is generating alarm among scholars … [Read more...]
Oxfam report: Ending the Era of Tax Havens
Back in June 2000, three years before TJN's birth and at a time when nobody was talking about the issues, the charity Oxfam published a seminal document entitled Tax Havens: Releasing the hidden billions for poverty eradication. It was an important part of global tax justice history. We're … [Read more...]
UN asks IMF, World Bank, to study illicit financial flows
Highlighting a powerful new(ish) study: the final report on illicit financial flows and human rights of the UN Independent Expert, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky. It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but here are some of the top lines and just a few of the many important recommendations: Illicit … [Read more...]
Offshore Ireland implicated in bank collapse, once again
Update: now on Naked Capitalism (and note the comments underneath.) Update 2, March 1: now with added video at the end: a Live Register report on the IFSC, from 2012. We have written a great deal about the role of Ireland and the Irish Financial Services Centre (IFSC) and its role as an … [Read more...]
A Leak in Paradise – screening of this extraordinary documentary film about Swiss whistleblower Ruedi Elmer
Ana Gomes (S&D) and Fabio De Masi (GUE/NGL) Members of the Intergroup on Integrity, Transparency, Corruption and Organised Crime (ITCO) invite you to the screening of - A LEAK IN PARADISE - … [Read more...]
HSBC: a very different relocation, tax haven to muckier tax haven
We've just written about HSBC's extensive lobbying effort to water down UK banking reforms by pretending it was planning to throw its toys out of the pram relocate its head office from London to Hong Kong if it didn't get what it wanted. But inside HSBC, a very real relocation is underway. Via … [Read more...]
PwC: using ‘competitiveness’ as crowbar to lobby for mining cos
From Fools' Gold: Recently we wrote an article entitled The Ideologists of the Competitiveness Agenda, in which we fingered the Big Four firm of accountants as among the most important vectors for the general idea that countries simply have to 'compete' in certain ways: namely, to shower goodies … [Read more...]
KPMG: Professional Chameleons Or Independent Public Auditors And Regulators?
A new guest blog by Atul K. Shah, Senior Lecturer, Suffolk Business School, University Campus Suffolk, UK. This is based on a paper Shah first presented at a Tax Justice Network Research Workshop at City University in June 2015, and it follows a more focused piece last month calling for a probe … [Read more...]
The Finance Curse: Britain and the World Economy, new paper
We've pointed to a draft of this before, but here is the final published version, in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, a paper by two TJNers and Duncan Wigan of the Copenhagen Business School. (It's also available here.) The abstract goes like this: The Global … [Read more...]
Actor Greg Wise takes on the UK tax avoidance industry in Dispatches tonight
Actor Greg Wise was so disgusted by the evidence of how HSBC bank helped its clients evade taxes through its Swiss subsidiary, he got angry, very angry indeed. So he turned undercover investigator to expose the disgraceful lack of ethics of the tax dodging industry. As one of the tax … [Read more...]
Tax Haven USA – part two: Rothschilds (nearly) confirms Tax Justice Network position
One year ago, Tax Justice Network published a blog detailing the ways in which the USA is steadily turning itself into a vortex-shaped hole in the global financial system. Others have picked up on the theme, including The Economist which rightly labelled the USA as "the mega-haven". Now, … [Read more...]
