This Jersey Rev has a lot to learn about transparency

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The following letter was in the Church Times (the Church of England's newspaper) a week or so ago (but I've just seen it):

From the Revd Martin Dryden

Sir, – Whatever the meaning of the expressions “tax avoidance”, “tax evasion”, and “tax-dodging” (Letters, 8 and 15 April), I thoroughly applaud Christian Aid's focus on the causes and not just the symp­toms of poverty, as expressed by its economic-justice researcher Julian Boys.

What I do not applaud is Chris­tian Aid's continued insistence that tax-dodging in developing countries amounts to $US160 billion per annum. This claim was first made by Christian Aid in 2008 in its report Death and Taxes, which relied on research carried out by an organisation known as the Tax Justice Network.

The data underlying this claim was examined in a report published in March 2010 by Richard Teather, a senior lecturer in taxation at the Bournemouth University Business School, and a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute. He identified serious errors, not only in the data itself, but also in the underlying assumptions used to compile it.

The $US160-billion claim is derived from data that include the export from China to Spain of 66 million fridge-freezers in 2006 (four per family) at a price of less than €1 each. This was clearly a data-capture error, but it remains uncorrected.

Furthermore, Christian Aid's claim that 350,000 children aged five or under die per annum in the Third World as the result of tax-dodging appears to have been based entirely on one book, Capitalism's Achilles Heel (Wiley, 2005) by Raymond W. Baker, which made an “estimate” that “seven per cent of trade volumes is illicit capital movement, by false invoicing between unrelated parties and by abusive transfer pricing within multinational groups.” This figure was based on interviews with “over 335 bankers, politicians, govern­ment officials, economists, attorneys, tax collectors, security officers, and social scientists”.While anecdotes and opinions are important, they are no substitute for rigorous statistical analysis. Mr Teather's best estimate, after exten­sive analysis, is that the underlying data used by Christian Aid supports no more than 2.5 per cent of the $US160-billion loss, a figure that he categorises as “statistically insignifi­cant”.

Christian Aid is an internation­ally recognised organisation that commands considerable moral authority. It is in danger of dam­aging that authority by continuing to rely on unverified statistics, when it knows (or at least has good reason to suspect) that they are inaccurate.

My second concern is that if the real number is indeed a fraction of the $US160 billion claimed, then Christian Aid is diverting its (and our) attention away from the main contributors to poverty in the Third World, such as bad economic policy and corruption. In short, we are in danger of avoiding the real issues – or should I say dodging them?

MARTIN DRYDEN

Mont Ubé House

La Rue de la Blinerie

St Clément

Jersey JE2 6QT

Where to begin. Well, first with this report of the ordination of the Rev Dryden:

TWO new Church of England deacons from Jersey, Tracy Le Couteur and Martin Dryden, have been ordained by the Bishop of Winchester in Winchester Cathedral.

Mr Dryden, who works in the finance industry ... is employed by Mourants as a non-executive director.

He continued: ‘Every priest is still a deacon — even the Bishop of Winchester is still a deacon, and priests carry that part of their calling on with them as they go forward to the next stage.'

Both Miss Le Couteur and Mr Dryden ... will .... retain their jobs, Miss Le Couteur working in the church parish office and Mr Dryden in finance.

So, Mr Dryden may be the Rev, but he fails to disclose that he works in the finance industry in Jersey (and my sources tell me, always has) and is indeed connected to Mourants - lawyers perhaps best known for hosting the activities of Northern Rock's shadow company, Granite plc in Jersey. Something which clearly was a great service to society. That's not quite the sort of transparency or disclosure of conflicts of interest one would hope for in a letter to the Church Times.

Second, he's got his facts wrong: Christian Aid researched the data referred to. The Tax Justice Network and I did not.

Third, there's another massive lack of clarity about Richard Teather's work. You'd think from the way it was introduced by Mr Dryden that it was an academic study. It wasn't: it was published by Jersey Finance, with which he is intimately acquainted. As far as I can see, that was also the end of its influence: I cannot see it cited anywhere. So this is a report dedicated to the preservation of offshore wealth by the world's rich who wish to avoid the regulatory obligations imposed by their own states by hiding behind the veil of secrecy provided by the secrecy jurisdiction of Jersey. Clearly that's an objective source to quote in the Church of England newspaper.

On the other hand Raymond Baker's estimate has been endorsed by the World Bank as the best there is. And the book was one of the FT's top ten books of the year when it came out.

And as for Christian Aid's data? Well, of course the figure was an estimate. And of course if you use the biggest data set on world trade that there is then there will be some errors in it: no doubt at all. I accept that entirely. But does one error mean the whole data set was wrong? Or that there's no trade mispricing? That would be a ridiculous conclusion - with which the OECD, G20, UN, EU and many others clearly disagree. But that's ignored by the Rev Dryden, a man whose inability to disclose the truth seems...well,  inadequate for a man of the cloth when writing in that capacity.

So let me remind Rev Dryden what I think the Christian Ministry is about: it's this from Luke 4:18 & 19 when Jesus said, announcing his ministry in the synagogue in Nazareth:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has chosen me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free the oppressed
and announce that the time has come
when the Lord will save his people.

He was announcing a Jubilee - a freedom from the burdens of finance.

Rev Dryden works to keep the yoke of financial burden on the world's poor and criticises those who seek to fulfil the ministry  from Nazareth.

It's a sad day for the Church when that happens, and it massively undermines its authority to speak on moral issues when it does.

And in the meantime Rev Dryden might like to learn a little about transparency and honest accounting. But given his background maybe I'll hope in vain.


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