Africa’s missing billions | The Argument.

For Africa, the era of banking secrecy is far from over argues Khadija Sharife writing in Foreign Policy.

As she notes:

The G-20′s London summit, which saw British Prime Minister Gordon Brown boldly declare, “The era of banking secrecy is over,” was a good start. But G-20 leaders, focused on tax evasion in their countries, failed to notice that the developing world loses an estimated $385 billion to tax abuse annually. They failed to call for country-by-country reporting or mandatory automatic exchanges of information about where corporate profits are going. Nor were there any calls to recover and return the estimated $11.5 trillion currently stashed in tax havens dotting the globe. Instead, the G-20 countries proposed bilateral tax arrangements related to “suspected” tax evasion, and this, on “request” only. Good luck getting complicit African governments to turn on their multinational partners.

Precisely.

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