John Christensen ■ A Law Unto Themselves – Eva Joly discusses her fight against high level corrupt practices
Published:
19 August 2014Reading time:
< 1 minIn this half-hour
BBC interview with renowned lawyer Helena Kennedy, investigative judge Eva Joly (a great friend of TJN) talks about her life fighting corrupt activities at the highest echelons of business and politics.
Eva comments that despite all the political rhetoric little progress has been made in fighting grand corruption, and she discusses the barriers to justice created by secrecy jurisdictions, including Dubai which she describes as the new money-laundering centre of the world.
Worse, she discusses how power has passed from politicians to transnational companies, which use extraorindarily complex and opaque structures to hide their tax avoidance and looting of Africa and other continents.
Listen to the fascinating interview here.
The author
Related articles
The tax justice stories that defined 2025
Let’s make Elon Musk the world’s richest man this Christmas!
2025: The year tax justice became part of the world’s problem-solving infrastructure
Bled dry: The gendered impact of tax abuse, illicit financial flows and debt in Africa
Bled Dry: How tax abuse, illicit financial flows and debt affect women and girls in Africa
9 December 2025
‘Illicit financial flows as a definition is the elephant in the room’ — India at the UN tax negotiations
Tackling Profit Shifting in the Oil and Gas Sector for a Just Transition
Follow the money: Rethinking geographical risk assessment in money laundering
Democracy, Natural Resources, and the use of Tax Havens by Firms in Emerging Markets
Fascinating? Her points in documents and interviews are a collection of outright lies and turning facts upside down rhetorically. These are not green politics, but red.
The problem when a top leader in politics gives the public high tax, like in Iceland not long ago, and then sneaks away his own money from taxations, is the high tax system itself.
Unless Eva Joly is a Stalinist or a monarchy feudalist of the type before 1789, she should know that high tax and state monopolies are the main causes of inefficient state spending and corruption between state and state paid anbud/monopoly for one big company.
Her solution is no solution, but an anti-liberal attempt to make it worse. Many investors and entrepreneurs left France already.