The UN reports:

Dominican Republic President Leonel Fern?°ndez today called on the United Nations General Assembly to consider a possible tax on tax havens, off-shore banks and international financial centres to make up for the damage the global economic crisis has wrought on efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

“The only way to really tackle achieving the MDGs by the scheduled date of 2015 is for this General Assembly to help create the conditions for a real commitment by nations, governmental and non-governmental institutions to assume as a matter of urgency the tasks of economic and social development for peoples stricken by poverty, hunger, sickness and illiteracy,” he said.

“It cannot be argued that there are not sufficient resources to confront this huge task [of funding the MDGs],” he declared. “The diligent way in which the collapse of the international financial system has been addressed show us something that has always been on the lips of the people, that ‘when there’s a will, there’s a way’...

“There are abundant resources in the world. What is happening is that they are distributed unequally and unjustly, and this is due, among other reason, to the existence of a global financial architecture prone to lack of transparency, secrecy, withholding of capital, evasion and fraud.”

He is absolutely right.

And this is the source of the funding needed to tackle the issue.

Which is why those who defend offshore and the massive injustice it permits are responsible for the deaths of thousands of people daily by hiding the resources, many of them stolen from the poorest countries in the world whether through corruption, crime or transfer mispricing, that are needed to remedy this massive injustice.

NB: I'm aware the Dominican Republic has its own issues to tackle in this regard - I'm highlighting the content of the message, not its source