Christian Aid issued the following comment this aftenoon and as I work closely with them I endorse it: Significant international pressure from an increasing number of policy makers is steadily mounting against the secrecy offered by tax havens, says Christian Aid following the G20 in Cannes. While the Eurocrisis took centre stage at the summit, a
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The G20 communique is weak. This is the best bit as far as I’m concerned: We underline the importance of comprehensive tax information exchange and encourage work in the Global Forum to define the means to improve it. But since they’re asking the OECD to do this and they are not committed to automatic information exchange which is
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The G20 is to sign a convention on tax evasion on Friday. I have not a clue what is in it, if I am honest. I know it is additional to the attack on tax havens it is also proposing. It is welcome, nonetheless, although I do not have high hopes for it. As I have said on
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The G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors met a week or so ago – and as I was distracted I did not notice. In their final communique they said: We agreed to maintain momentum for action to tackle non-cooperative jurisdictions and to fully implement the G20 anti-corruption action plan. We asked the Global Forum to report
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As the Independent notes: The French President Nicolas Sarkozy opened his presidency of the G20 group of nations yesterday by calling for a $100bn (£62bn) tax on banks. The so-called "Tobin tax" on transactions has been championed by organisations such as Oxfam and the TUC, but the financial services industry vehemently opposes it. The finance
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A group of civil society organisations in the U.S. has just published an open letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, outlining a series of steps which, as Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch notes: “would inject much-needed transparency into the global financial system and help ensure that governments are accountable to their people and
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The G20 finance minister’s communiqu?© says: We expressed the importance we place in achieving a single set of high quality, global accounting standards and urged the International Accounting Standards Board and the Financial Accounting Standards Board to redouble their efforts to that end. We encouraged the International Accounting Standards Board to further improve involvement of
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Global Financial Integrity (GFI) launched its "G20 Transparency" campaign today, an international grassroots sign-on drive to collect 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for greater transparency in the global financial system.  The petition will be delivered to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper prior to the G20 meeting in Toronto at the end of June. The
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This letter went out today to the Finance Ministers of G20 countries, signed by nine organisations including the Tax Justice Network. For the pdf version, with logos and signatures, click here. Wednesday, October 28th 2009 Dear Finance Minister, In the run-up to the G20 Finance Ministers’ meeting in St Andrews, civil society organisations from around
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