The Prime Minister will raise the prospect at next week's anti-corruption summit after the world was rocked by revelations of mass-scale tax haven use in the so-called Panama Papers.

Such a body would help national agencies and investigators crack down on money laundering and would likely involve a broadening of the OECD's remit to root out bribery and tax crime.

If this is true then next week's corruption summit is going to be a farce.

As I noted the Tax Justice Network saying earlier this week:

TJN has long held the view that Britain is at the forefront of the global supply side of corruption.  Ten years ago TJN's director John Christensen slammed the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index for corrupting perceptions of corruption, arguing that:

“The elephant in the living room of the corruption debate is the role played by the global infrastructure of banks, legal and accounting businesses, tax havens and related financial intermediaries in providing an offshore interface between the illicit and licit economies.”

Britain and its offshore satellites — including Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands, Gibraltar, the Turks & Caicos Islands, and others — is the world's largest tax haven empire.

Or as I wrote in  a briefing for a journalist yesterday:

The activists who actually put the tax haven issue on the international agenda are already saying that moves to tackle the same old petty corruption that has been the ficus of most international attention to date is not enough. They argue that old definitions — that corruption is, for example, a state official abusing their position for private gain and hiding that in a tax haven — are already being tackled by the measures introduced over the last three or so years and that if this summit is going to achieve anything it has to deal with the bigger issue.

That bigger issue is that challenge that tax havens pose to international capitalism itself, and so our way of life. Their argument can be summarised by veteran tax campaigner Professor Richard Murphy:

"We've already tackled the low hanging fruit in tax havens, like obvious tax evasion. The remaining problems are the tough ones to tackle. They all relate to secrecy. The secrecy that, for example, means we don't quite know how so many football clubs, owned from tax havens, are really controlled. Or the secrecy that means we do not fully understand what happens in many multinational corporations, but where we can all see the consequences. This can only now be tackled by addressing the opacity of tax havens."

And as Toby Quantrill of Christian Aid said in a press release last night: