Page 55 – Tax Justice Network

Our new FSI survey report, with many thanks to all who contributed

The implications of financial secrecy offered by tax havens have never been higher on the agenda of both national and international policymakers. The difficulty in defining tax havens and the susceptibility to political pressure on processes of drawing up lists of havens led the Tax Justice Network to create the Financial Secrecy Index (FSI). Conceived in 2007 and published on a biannual basis since 2009, the FSI ranks some major economies ahead of the ‘usual suspects’ and reveals a spectrum of secrecy rather than a binary division between ‘tax havens’ and others.

While some methodological improvements have been made since the FSI was first published, in 2016 we carried out the first full-scale review of the index in order to adapt the FSI for the decade ahead. The review process comprises two main elements: firstly, an independent statistical audit by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, and secondly, a detailed and technical survey with various stakeholder groups.

Today, we publish the results of the stakeholders survey (pdf). The survey was conducted from January to March 2016, and distributed across TJN networks and to specific stakeholder groups through targeted emails. Over 200 people responded to the survey, (although 70 were screened out by an introductory question regarding knowledge of the FSI). The remaining 136 respondents come from 49 different countries, including developing countries, OECD member states and small island financial centres. Of these, 86 respondents completed the entire survey, and therefore for each question we have between 86 and a maximum of 136 responses. Continue reading “The Financial Secrecy Index Methodological Review – Results of the Stakeholder Survey” →

In this month’s Spanish language podcast presented by Marcelo Justo and Marta Nunez: (abajo en castellano)

– we go to Colombia, where tax evasion isn’t a crime
– the magical realism of tax havens: how the multinational company Fresh Del Monte exports pineapple from Costa Rica from… the Cayman Islands?!
– what impact did the Panama Papers really have in Latin America? A big scandal? Or a fuss about nothing?
– we begin our story of the history of tax havens from Sir Francis Drake until today Continue reading “Our Spanish language tax justice podcast is out! ¡Salió nuestro podcast en castellano!” →

Our friends at Righting Finance have released their fourth in a series of advocacy tools on tax policy and international cooperation for human rights. The aim of these advocacy tools is to assist education and dissemination of the standards on tax policy and human rights contained in a report produced by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in 2014.

Continue reading “Advocacy tools on tax policy and international cooperation for human rights” →

Press Release: For immediate release, July 22, 2016

The G20 and OECD tax haven blacklist proposals risk becoming another whitewash

This weekend G20 Finance Ministers from the G20 countries will meet in China. One of the items on their agenda will be to agree the criteria for identifying non-cooperative jurisdictions with respect to tax transparency, which the OECD has been mandated to establish. The first details of the proposals have become public and our analysis gives rise to grave concerns that the criteria are, in the same way as past attempts at blacklists, weak and ineffective. The USA in particular is likely to escape blacklisting because of the peculiar nature of the criteria.

The three criteria the OECD has come up with for assessing non-cooperative jurisdictions are summarised below. Each country has to meet two of the three in order to escape blacklisting:

If the country gets a rating of “largely compliant” or better from the OECD’s Global Forum, as regards the “exchange of information on request” standard of transparency.
The country commits to adopting automatic information exchange (the so-called Common Reporting Standard, CRS), and to begin exchanges by 2018 at the latest.
The country has signed the Multilateral Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters (MCMAA), a multilateral framework for all kinds of information exchange, or if it has what the OECD considers a sufficiently broad exchange network providing for exchange of information on request and automatic exchange of information.

Continue reading “The G20 and OECD tax haven blacklist proposals risk becoming another whitewash” →

In the July 2016 Taxcast:

‘Hello. This is John Doe. Interested in data? I’m happy to share.’ We talk to the two journalists who got the Panama Papers scoop, Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier who’ve written a book about their experience.

Plus: what does Brexit mean for tax justice? We discuss the F4 (unholy) alliance between Switzerland, Hong Kong, Singapore and the UK, and the accelerated corporate tax race to the bottom.

‘Unfortunately there is the world people like you and me are living in and there is a second world, a parallel world, the offshore world where people with enough money will always find possibilities to hide their money…there are people out there choosing which law they want to stick to and that is a problem for democracy.’ Frederik Obermaier

‘I am very clear about what would happen if you take away the secrecy, if you take away the anonymity. I am completely sure that the whole system would crash because why would they go to the British Virgin Islands for a company when you can see who owns it? You know, it’s not rocket science.’ Bastian Obermayer

Post-Brexit: ‘I think that Britain’s likely development strategy will be to actually deepen its tax haven role sitting offshore Europe.’ John Christensen

Featuring: The Tax Justice Network’s John Christensen, Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier of the Sudduetsche Zeitung newspaper and authors of the new book: The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money. Produced and presented by Naomi Fowler for the Tax Justice Network. Also available on iTunes.

Subscribe to the Taxcast either by emailing naomi [at] taxjustice.net to be added to the mailout list OR use our rss feed OR subscribe to our youtube channel Tax Justice TV.

Finance Ministers from the G20 countries meet in China on July 23-24 – this weekend. Amid sessions that will focus heavily on Brexit-related issues, there will be an important tax component. At their previous meeting they mandated the OECD to “establish objective criteria . . . to identify non-cooperative jurisdictions with respect to tax transparency.”

A blacklist, in other words.

Continue reading “Will the OECD tax haven blacklist be another whitewash?” →

After Panama: developing countries need to be involved more closely in international co-operation on tax issues

A guest blog by Christian von Haldenwang, German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)

Bonn, July 4, 2016 – Two major mechanisms squeeze the tax base in developing and emerging countries. Rich individuals evade their tax obligations by moving money abroad and submitting false statements regarding income and assets. Large multinational companies exploit international loopholes in laws and regulations and shift profits artificially to states with particularly low rates of taxation. Continue reading “Guest blog: involve developing countries more in international tax co-operation” →

From UNCTAD, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, via email:

“Some commodity dependent developing countries are losing as much as 67% of their exports worth billions of dollars to trade misinvoicing, according to a fresh study by UNCTAD, which for the first time analyses this issue for specific commodities and countries.

Trade misinvoicing is thought to be one of the largest drivers of illicit financial flows from developing countries, so that the countries lose precious foreign exchange earnings, tax, and income that might otherwise be spent on development.”

Continue reading “Some countries “lose” 2/3 of exports to misinvoicing” →

Jean-Claude, Juncker, the President of the European Commission, has long tried to distance himself from his role as one of the key architects of Luxembourg’s crime-fueled tax haven factory. An excellent new investigation by Newsweek now reminds us of his efforts to display whiter-than-white credentials:

“It’s the tax authorities that develop the specific rules that are applied,” [Juncker] said last September during a hearing of the European Parliament. “I haven’t taken a position on individual tax dossiers because that also isn’t my role. The Luxembourg tax authorities are very allergic to the idea of ministerial interference.”

Continue reading “New questions over Juncker’s role in Amazon Luxembourg affair” →

From the Global Alliance for Tax Justice, on June 28:

“On June 28th , Madrid saw the presentation ceremony of the Spanish Plataforma por la Justicia Fiscal (Platform for Tax Justice),an alliance of public organizations, trade unions, social movements, NGOs and others society civil groups. The Platform considers that “the actual tax situation of the country is unacceptable because it is unfair, regressive and insufficient. The alliance organizes itself with social movements to achieve a progressive, sufficient and fair tax system”.

Read the full article in Spanish here.

? ¡Nace una Plataforma por la Justicia Fiscal en España!

? Crimen medio-ambiental relacionado con la injusticia fiscal“

Luxembourg; not so pretty beneath the surface

Luxembourg: not so pretty under the surface

A month ago we wrote an article entitled Now Luxembourg, Switzerland are working to bolster Tax Haven USA. This concerns a global scheme to share banking information, the OECD-led Common Reporting Standard, (CRS, which starts up next year and complements separate schemes and campaigns to see public disclosure of the beneficial owners of entities and arrangements like trusts and companies.)

In a nutshell, under the CRS you are supposed to ‘look through’ certain investment entities to their beneficial owners, if that entity is not in a ‘participating jurisdiction’ – that is, participating in the CRS. The United States isn’t a participating jurisdiction: it has its own FATCA programme which is loosely and very imperfectly hooked up to the CRS: for more details see our Loophole USA blog. Continue reading “Luxembourg backing down on supporting tax haven USA” →

George Rosvany won’t work as a corporate lobbyist again

In March The Economist magazine rang alarm bells (again) about a rise in concentrated market power: a problem where the biggest firms get ever bigger and more like monopolies, making it easy to extract wealth from the rest of us (as opposed to creating wealth.) This, in turn fosters steeper inequality and poverty and reduces economic growth. As they put it:

“High profits across a whole economy can be a sign of sickness. They can signal the existence of firms more adept at siphoning wealth off than creating it afresh, such as those that exploit monopolies. If companies capture more profits than they can spend, it can lead to a shortfall of demand.”

Continue reading “Top tax expert: Big 4 “accountants of fortune” must be broken up” →

A United Nations body has called on the single largest financial secrecy jurisdiction in the world – the United Kingdom and its Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies – to account for the human rights impacts of its unjust tax policies at home and abroad.

The call was issued by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which oversees compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Drawing on a joint report by the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR), the Tax Justice Network (TJN) and the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law (GJC), the Committee voiced concerns that the UK’s financial secrecy legislation and permissive rules on corporate tax are undermining the proper resourcing of human rights, thereby affecting the ability of other States to mobilize resources for the implementation of economic, social and cultural rights. Continue reading “UN calls UK to account over impact of unjust tax laws” →

The European Union, amid all the Brexit turmoil, has issued a proposal for a new Directive on money laundering and terrorist financing. Transparency, of course, is at the core of it. The Panama Papers scandal has given new urgency to the task of unmasking the corrupt, the crooks and other financial miscreants, and it’s clear that business supports us: in a survey of 2,800 senior executives in 62 countries, Ernst & Young found that 91% of respondents believe it is important to know the ultimate beneficial ownership of the entities with which they do business.

So how does the new Directive (an amendment to what is known as the Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive) look? In short, there are two main things. Continue reading “New EU Directive on Money Laundering – a curate’s egg” →

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The race to the bottom: the UK forges ahead

Just before the Brexit vote we quoted Adam Posen, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, about what might happen in a post-Brexit Britain:

“If you’re anti-regulation fantasists to begin with, you start going down the path, ‘Oh we can become an even more offshore center. We can become the Cayman Islands writ large, or Panama writ large.’ And this frankly is the way I think this also spills over to the rest of the world, is that the UK decides, ‘Hey, regulatory arbitrage, letting AIG financial products run in London, actually destroyed the US financial system, but didn’t hurt us – made us a lot of money. Let us continue down this path. Let us be the ‘race to the bottom’ financial center. And I think this that’s where this going, because they’re not going to have any other option. It’s not good.”

And this is already being played out. Take a look, just for example, at this quote from Chris Cummings of the extremely peculiar and powerful TheCityUK (and by extension the City of London Corporation), illustrating Posen’s point very exactly: Continue reading “Anti-tax, anti-regulation sirens already emerging after Brexit” →

The best disinfectant

From Global Witness:

“Information on who ultimately owns and controls British companies goes live for the first time today.”

That’s good news, amid all the Brexit brouhaha (and idiotic and dangerous plans to privatise the UK’s Land Registry.) Meanwhile, the FACT coalition in the United States describes a different development in corporate transparency:

“The U.S. Department of Treasury released new rules today to require multinational companies to report profits and taxes paid on a country by country basis. This is the first time that this information is being gathered in the United States and shared with other nations. The information will be filed with the IRS and shared with states’ and other countries’ tax authorities with which the U.S. has agreements to exchange tax information.”

Continue reading “Two new transparency advances, in UK and US” →

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London, going further offshore?

Cross-posted from Fools’ Gold.

We have our own particular reasons for disliking Brexit – the recent decision by the UK to leave the European Union.

In a pre-Brexit analysis we quoted Adam Posen, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who articulated what is probably our biggest generic concern:

“If you’re anti-regulation fantasists to begin with, you start going down the path, ‘Oh we can become an even more offshore center. We can become the Cayman Islands writ large, or Panama writ large.’ And this frankly is the way I think this also spills over to the rest of the world, is that the UK decides, ‘Hey, regulatory arbitrage, letting AIG financial products run in London, actually destroyed the US financial system, but didn’t hurt us – made us a lot of money. Let us continue down this path. Let us be the ‘race to the bottom’ financial center. And I think this that’s where this going, because they’re not going to have any other option. It’s not good.”

Continue reading “Brexit gets worse as London seeks to wriggle free from UK” →

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The verdicts are in. Today the Luxembourg court sentenced Antoine Deltour to 12 month suspended jail time and a €1,500 fine. Raphaël Halet is sentenced to 9-month suspended jail time and a 1,000 € fine. The journalist Edouard Perrin was acquitted. A statement from Antoine Deltour’s support committee is here.

Antoine Deltour said:

“Sentencing the citizens at the origin of LuxLeaks revelations is equivalent to sentencing the regulatory advancements which have been triggered by these revelations and which have been widely acclaimed across Europe. This is also a warning towards future whistleblowers, which is detrimental to citizen’s information and the good functioning of the democracy.”

These whistleblowers are heroes who acted in the public interest, the public interest of all the other countries in the EU and beyond, which have lost enormous tax revenues to the secret deals drawn up by the Luxembourg state; but also the public interest of Luxembourg itself, where citizens are now able to see how far the state has corrupted itself in the interests of poaching the tax base from activities that take place elsewhere.

It is our position that Luxembourg itself has been on trial in this case, and has been found guilty on multiple counts.

We must ask too, in whose interest has the trial of these heroes been? Not the citizens and domestic companies of Luxembourg, for whom no secret deals were on offer. Not the Luxembourg state, which should be addressing the shocking failures of governance that have been revealed. No, this trial appears to have been carried out at the prompting of PwC, the big 4 accounting firm who led the others in exploiting these secretive opportunities for abuse. Where are PwC and the rest of the big 4 today? Do they welcome the prosecution of whistleblowers? Or do they hang their heads in shame for the tax abuses they have commissioned and profited from?

The Tax Justice Network now calls on the big 4 firms to present aggregate data annually, showing the alignment or otherwise of their clients’ declared profits with the location of their real economic activity – and the tax implications. They should also support their clients to publish individually the country-by-country reporting that will show which companies are playing by the rules, and which are cheating the system.

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[/vc_raw_js][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text]Via e-mail, we’ve had a couple of other statements, from other organisations.

First, Christian Aid:

Wednesday 29^th June 2016

PROTECT WHISTLEBLOWERS & END SECRECY AROUND MULTINATIONALS’ TAX: CHRISTIAN AID

As whistleblowers who exposed multinationals’ cosy tax deals were sentenced in Luxembourg today, Christian Aid said the public should thank, not punish them.

“These whistleblowers deserve our thanks for exposing the scandalous ‘sweetheart’ tax deals between governments and multinationals,” said Toby Quantrill, Christian Aid’s Principal Adviser on Economic Justice.

“The deals were deeply unfair to the millions of ordinary people and small companies who have no choice but to pay their taxes and who need the hospitals, schools and many other public services funded by tax.

”Even though the sentences handed down today were suspended, they send completely the wrong signal about what the whistleblowers did. For society at large, they were heroes, not villains.”

Mr Quantrill added: “One of the many disturbing aspects of this case is that more than a year after LuxLeaks, very little has changed. We still don’t know what taxes multinationals pay in each country, or what cosy deals they may have done with European governments, including the UK’s.

“Despite the outrage around scandals such as LuxLeaks, we remain reliant on people prepared to risk prison to reveal information which should already be in the public domain. That is a further scandal.”

However in an encouraging development yesterday (Tuesday 28^th June), UK MPs came very close to approving a reform that would help curb multinational tax dodging around the world.

The move almost won House of Commons approval, after 273 MPs from all the major parties voted in favour – only 22 short of the number needed.

The Chancellor George Osborne is now facing calls to use his power to ensure the ‘ShowMeTheMoney’ amendment to the Finance Bill becomes law.

It would require multinational companies above a certain size to publish information that they already have to give the UK taxman, about key details of their business in each country where they operate.

Such information can reveal suspicious patterns which warrant further investigation and may reflect a firm’s failure to pay its fair share of tax in all the countries where it operates.

Caroline Flint, MP for Don Valley, tabled the amendment, which was in turn backed by MPs from the Conservatives, UKIP, the Liberal Democrats, Labour, the Scottish Nationalists, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SDLP. Others supporting the amendment included Christian Aid, Oxfam, Save the Children, ActionAid and the Tax Justice Network.

Second, Eurodad:

Campaigners condemn punishment of Luxleaks whistleblowers who acted in the public interest

Wednesday June 29 2016

Tax Justice campaigners today condemned the punishment of Antoine Deltour and Raphaël Halet – two whistleblowers who were instrumental in exposing the infamous ‘Luxleaks’ scandal.

Mr Deltour was given a 12 month suspended prison sentence and a €1500 fine. Mr Halet was given a 9 month suspended prison sentence and a €1000 fine. French journalist Edouard Perrin was acquitted.

All three men helped expose the secret sweetheart deals signed by the Luxembourg government that allowed numerous multinational corporations to reduce their tax bills dramatically, in some cases to less than 1%.

Tove Ryding, Tax justice Coordinator at the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) said: “The sentences imposed on these men are a complete disgrace and an indictment of the system that has condemned them. They acted in the public interest and deserve thanks and protection from prosecution. They revealed the secret tax deals that allowed huge corporations to pay next to nothing to the public purse. These kind of deals mean both developed countries, and the poorest nations in the world, lose billions every year.

“This information should not have been secret in the first place. There is no reason why citizens should not be allowed to know where multinational corporations do their business and where they pay their taxes.”

More than 200,000 people have shown their support for Antoine Deltour through this online petition alone: https://www.change.org/p/support-antoine-deltour-luxleaks?lang=en-GB

Ryding said: “We are calling for protection for all whistleblowers so that what happened to these three men today can never happen again. We also believe it is about time for the politicians to make multinational corporations publish the numbers showing where they make their profits and where they pay their taxes.”

ENDS

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From Transparify.com, a new report:

“We visited think tanks’ websites and looked at the funding and donor information disclosed online, including in online annual reports. Institutions rated with the maximum of five stars are highly transparent about who funds them. Think tanks with four stars are broadly transparent; typically, they do not disclose the precise amounts given, but instead group their donors into several funding brackets. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the funding of think tanks with zero stars or one star is highly opaque as they fail to disclose even the names of some or all of their donors.”

And the results for the UK are here (other tables are available for other regions). Continue reading “New ranking of how transparent the think tanks are” →

Embargoed until 6pm CET 28 June 2016

Should Europe trust trusts?

Press Release: New report exposes holes in global and EU anti-money laundering rules on trusts, and explains how they can be fixed.

Trusts, in the popular imagination, are mostly for family matters, such as a rich father deciding how his offspring will divide the inheritance. But they are far more widely used: not just for multiple commercial purposes, but also, as the Panama Papers reminded us, to commit crimes and abuses such as tax evasion, money laundering, corruption, defrauding creditors, and more. Trusts are in many ways a greater threat to democracy than opaque shell companies – yet also harder to crack. The accompanying Tax Justice Network briefing exposes shortcomings in current international frameworks for dealing with trusts, and explains what international bodies such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF,) the European Union, and major countries, could do to pierce trust-related secrecy and prevent their misuse. Continue reading “Should Europe trust trusts?” →

Antoine Deltour, Edouard Perrin, Raphael Halet

Tomorrow afternoon the “LuxLeaks” trial will end and the two whistleblowers, Antoine Deltour and Raphaël Halet, as well as the journalist Eduard Perrin, will know whether they will be punished or not, for breaking Luxembourg’s secrecy regime. They face up to 18 months in jail for exposing lurid details of some of the most artificial and egregious schemes cooked up by PwC for the world’s banks and other multinationals – and the latter group seem to have got off the hook entirely. Earlier, Britain’s Private Eye accurately described the whole crooked process:

“the Grand Duchy’s multi-billion euro tax avoidance industry, the accountants who control it and the Ruritanian http://healthsavy.com/product/ambien/ justice system that persecutes the whistleblowers and journalist who exposed it.”

Protests are planned in Paris and Luxembourg – do turn up, if you’re in the area. Continue reading “Luxembourg on trial as Luxleaks whistleblowers await tomorrow’s verdict” →

We have for a while been sounding alarms about the emergence of (yet) another tax haven/secrecy jurisdiction in Kenya. A few months ago we quoted the newspaper African Arguments:

“Anti-corruption campaigner John Githongo has warned that in this setting, the NIFC “would be like a financial crime aircraft carrier, self-contained and able to cause considerable damage”.

We noted, too, the central role played by the Lord Mayor of the City of London Corporation and one of the City Corporation’s main lobbying bodies, TheCityUK. Now, via the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya, a new draft Nairobi International Financial Centre Bill, 2016, which we believe came out this month. Its preamble calls it:

“A BILL for an Act of Parliament to provide a framework to facilitate and support the development of an efficient and globally competitive financial services sector in Kenya . . “

Continue reading “Kenya tax haven approaching: secrecy to be enforced with prison terms” →

The Financial Secrecy Index Methodological Review – Results of the Stakeholder Survey

Our Spanish language tax justice podcast is out! ¡Salió nuestro podcast en castellano!

Advocacy tools on tax policy and international cooperation for human rights

The G20 and OECD tax haven blacklist proposals risk becoming another whitewash

The G20 and OECD tax haven blacklist proposals risk becoming another whitewash

Our July 2016 Tax Justice Network Podcast is out

Will the OECD tax haven blacklist be another whitewash?

Guest blog: involve developing countries more in international tax co-operation

Some countries “lose” 2/3 of exports to misinvoicing

New questions over Juncker’s role in Amazon Luxembourg affair

New tax justice platform in Spain

Luxembourg backing down on supporting tax haven USA

Top tax expert: Big 4 “accountants of fortune” must be broken up

UN calls UK to account over impact of unjust tax laws

New EU Directive on Money Laundering – a curate’s egg

Anti-tax, anti-regulation sirens already emerging after Brexit

Two new transparency advances, in UK and US

Continue reading “Two new transparency advances, in UK and US” →

Brexit gets worse as London seeks to wriggle free from UK

The #LuxLeaks whistleblowers verdict: our statement

New ranking of how transparent the think tanks are

Should Europe trust trusts?

Should Europe trust trusts?

Luxembourg on trial as Luxleaks whistleblowers await tomorrow’s verdict

Kenya tax haven approaching: secrecy to be enforced with prison terms

The G20 and OECD tax haven blacklist proposals risk becoming another whitewash

Should Europe trust trusts?

Thank you!