February 2014 programme
Forget Jack the Ripper and the London Dungeons, we show you the murky side of the capital’s more recent past.
Occupy London Tours is a free alternative tour company, run by volunteers, who want to throw open the secretive world of finance and politics for all to see. Continue reading “Occupy London: February 2014 tour programme”
From OpenOil.net:
“Last month in Lagos, we broug
ht together activists from the tech and oil worlds for a hackathon on the extractive industries of Nigeria. Continue reading “Big Oil, Big Data: Nigerian corporate networks”
From Sigrid Klæboe Jacobsen, Director of TJN – Norge
In December, the Norwegian Parliament voted in favour of implementing country-by-country reporting. The Ministry of Finance has now announced the new regulations which tells us exactly what we’ve got, and what we haven’t got. Continue reading “Norway moves on Country by Country reporting”
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has pulled another humdinger of an investigation, publishing a Who’s Who in China’s offshore circles.
We could highlight any number of things from this excellent report, but we’ll choose just two: Continue reading “China Leaks: how the BVI became China’s foreign tax haven of choice”
“Are we Swiss all criminals?”
Photo: Nicholas Shaxson, with permission
From the Davos OpenForum 2014:
“Switzerland is known for its chocolate, watches and banking sector. But today, with traditional banking secrecy gone, the country has to reinvent itself to retain its competitive advantage.”
Our emphasis added. That’s news to us. Continue reading “Why is Davos held in the world’s top illicit money centre?”
Our attention has been drawn to a fascinating new report (sadly, in German only, an English language summary is here) on Switzerland’s double tax agreements (DTAs) with developing countries. Interestingly, although the report was produced by researchers from the renowned World Trade Institute at the University of Bern, the underlying study was commissioned by the development agency of the Swiss foreign ministry. However, since the findings are critical of Switzerland’s current international tax policy, the report has been hidden away in an obscure corner of the ministry’s website; we think its findings deserve a wider airing.
Continue reading “Swiss double tax agreements disadvantage poorer countries”
In the January 2014 Taxcast: Tax justice goes to the Cayman Islands;
the latest fall-out from #OffshoreLeaks, the expose on tax havens from
the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists; and HOW
much is Africa spending on corporate tax breaks??? The Taxcast looks
at tax incentives, Africa-style. Continue reading “Please go to www.thetaxcast.com (some glitches with the new website!)”
French anti-tax haven protesters target Jersey
According to Mediapart the French government is under fire, again, this time over its decision to remove both Bermuda and Jersey from its blacklist of uncooperative tax havens. Senior members of the government, including foreign affairs minister Laurent Fabius, are reported to be opposed to their removal. Mediapart reports that Fabius has advised finance minister Pierre Moscovici that these removals are “not politically opportune.” Continue reading “Outrage at Bermuda and Jersey removal from French blacklist”
Internet companies are running rings around our governments, free-riding on the backs of ordinary taxpayers and reaping large fortunes for relatively small numbers of well-connected insiders, some of them rich enough to buy entire global newspapers with their pocket change, and thus potentially influence us all. Continue reading “OECD: special tax rules for internet cos ‘unviable’”
Atlantis Resort, Bahamas. Another behemoth, Baha Mar, is being built.
Written for TJN by someone with long experience of the Bahamas.
The Bahamas is a stunningly beautiful archipelago of more than 700 islands, cays and islets, a proud nation populated with vibrant, passionate, good-hearted people. The economy of this small island state, ranked at 35th position on the 2013 Financial Secrecy Index and assessed towards the top end of the secrecy scale, is heavily reliant on the offshore financial services industry; the Bahamas is in the throes of the Finance Curse, as a captured state. Continue reading “The Bahamas – Another Captured State?”
Our new website will bring you a weekly round-up of tax justice news: our personal selection from a wide array of stories about tax justice, A Week in Tax Justice will be sent out to all TJN subscribers and will soon also be available on our App, which we’ll be bringing out in the next month or so.
Here is the inaugural public edition of A Week in Tax Justice. Enjoy! Continue reading “A week in Tax Justice: Jan 20”
July 22, 2012Update, June 2014: TJN responds to attacks on the report (pdf here).
MAIN REPORT 1 – The Price of Offshore Revisited: TJN’s in-depth and unprecedented study into the size of the offshore system of tax havens and/or secrecy jurisdictions. The report estimates that some $21-32 trillion is stashed offshore, in conditions of low or zero tax and substantial secrecy. Continue reading “The Price of Offshore, Revisited”
Welcome to the new Tax Justice Network website, with integrated blog.
Continue reading “Welcome to the new Tax Justice Network website and blog”
From the Treasure Islands blog:
I’ve just had an email from Stuart Syvret, a dissident former health minister in the British tax haven of Jersey, who has just got out of prison after challenging the island’s financially-dominated oligarchy. The email was in his characteristically forthright style:
“I and many of my former constituents have had our human rights monstrously abused in Jersey by corrupt Crown Officer holders. Continue reading “Big Newsweek exposé on human rights abuses in tax haven Jersey”
A while ago we wrote about this reprehensible item from world football’s governing body FIFA. This Tax Bubble that FIFA created around the South African world cup – despite FIFA’s being a gargantuan, unaccountable billionaire monopolist based in Switzerland – was a particularly shameful example of their anti-democratic rent-seeking behaviour.
And they are going to do it again and again.
Now the Public Eye Awards, which draw attention to particularly egregious corporate misbehaviour, have sent us this. Continue reading “Public Eye Awards: Help put FIFA in the Hall of Shame”
From Citizens for Tax Justice:
“How worried should we be that Boeing argues it should get a tax break for performing safety tests on its new planes? Continue reading “Quote of the day – Boeing”
The International Consortium of Investigative journalists last year began a rolling series of stories in partnership with media organisations around around the world, based on leaks of 2.5 million secret offshore records. Finding and releasing so much hard evidence on the subject that we have been so closely involved in for so many years has been tremendously influential in focusing politicians’ minds.
They have just published a very long list of changes that have happened in the offshore world since the leaks. Continue reading “Release of offshore records draws worldwide response”
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This blog is part of a series highlighting the narrative reports from a number of secrecy jurisdictions around the world, explaining how they became offshore financial centres.
From the Center for American Progress (hat tip: AABA), in the context of news reports of trillions of dollars in U.S. overseas profits “trapped” overseas, just waiting to be invested in the struggling U.S. economy – if only it could somehow be “unlocked” (such as through a corporate tax amnesty.) Our quote of the day:
“There is something trapped on the balance sheets of U.S. multinationals. But it is not corporate profits—it is federal tax revenue.”
Quite so. It’s important to understand what’s going on here. This U.S.-focused issue afflicts many other capital-exporting countries too.
From Commonwealth publishing:
An e-book by the acclaimed economist Ann Pettifor, Just Money: How We Can Break the Despotic Power of Finance. In it she explores the role of credit in the economy and its relationship with the money supply. She goes on to set out a set of policies to bring the economy back under substantial democratic control.
This is not, strictly speaking, a core tax justice issue. But we have recently been doing a lot of work on the political economy of financial centres – not least with our Finance Curse analysis. “Breaking the power of finance” is certainly something that interests us.
Available here (only, for the time being).
From David Quentin’s Tax and Law blog, just mentioned in our Links:
Vodafone’s 2013 “Tax Risk Management Strategy” paper, for example, concedes in its small print that Vodafone happily adopts filing positions which “will not meet the more-likely-than-not standard but would still be tenable”.
If the mining of tax risk may be understood in extractive terms, a policy of habitually adopting merely “tenable” filing positions is about as sustainable and responsible as fracking.
Well said. And the whole post is well worth reading.
This is a very dangerous development. From Euractiv:
“Former Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU’s longest-serving elder statesman, threw his hat into the ring yesterday (9 January) for the presidency of the European Commission to succeed José Manuel Barroso. Continue reading “Architect behind Eurozone’s biggest tax haven wants to be EC president”
