The Tax Justice Network Financial Secrecy Index was published this evening. As is said on the FSI site:
The Financial Secrecy Index ranks jurisdictions according to their secrecy and the scale of their offshore financial activities. A politically neutral ranking, it is a tool for understanding global financial secrecy, tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions, and illicit financial flows or capital flight.
The ranking looks like this:
Click on a jurisdiction's name to see the main report; and on its FSI value to access full database content. If you want to sort the table by a different column just click on the header by which you want to sort.
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Download: PDF | Excel |
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Footnote 1: The territories marked in Dark Blue are Overseas Territories (OTs) and Crown Dependencies (CDs) where the Queen is head of state; powers to appoint key government officials rest with the British Crown; laws must be approved in London; and the UK government holds various other powers (see here for more details: www.financialsecrecyindex.com/PDF/UnitedKingdom.pdf). Territories marked in light blue are British Commonwealth territories which are not OTs or CDs but whose final court of appeal is the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London (see here for more details: http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Privy_Council_and_Secrecy_Scores.pdf). To compute an FSI for the entire group of OTs and CDs (or also including the UK), we first need to calculate the group's joint Secrecy Score and joint Global Scale Weight. Calculating the joint Global Scale Weight is straightforward - we just sum up each jurisdiction's individual Global Scale Weight to arrive at 22.57% (or 5.2% excluding the UK). To combine the Secrecy Scores, we see at least four relevant options. Three of the four options result in the UK and its satellite network of secrecy jurisdictions to top the FSI by a large margin (read more on page 161, in: http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/PDF/FSI-Methodology.pdf). Note that our list excludes many British Commonwealth realms where the Queen remains head of state.
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Footnote 2: For these jurisdictions, we provide special narrative reports exploring the history and politics of their offshore sectors. You can read and download these reports by clicking on the country name.
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Footnote 3: For these jurisdictions, we took the secrecy score for the sub-national jurisdiction alone, but the Global Scale Weight (GSW) for the entire country. This is not ideal: we would prefer to use GSW data for sub-national jurisdictions - but this data is simply not available. As a result, these jurisdictions might be ranked higher in the index than is warranted.
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Footnote 4: The Secrecy Scores are calculated based on 20 indicators. For full explanation of the methodology and data sources, please read our FSI-methodology document, here: www.financialsecrecyindex.com/PDF/FSI-Methodology.pdf
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Footnote 5: The Global Scale Weight represent a jurisdiction's share in global financial services exports. For full explanation of the methodology and data sources, please read our FSI-methodology document, here: www.financialsecrecyindex.com/PDF/FSI-Methodology.pdf
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Footnote 6: The FSI Value is calculated by multiplying the cube of the Secrecy Score with the cube root of the Global Scale Weight. The final result is divided through by one hundred for presentational clarity.
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Footnote 7: The FSI Share is calculated by summing up all FSI Values, and then dividing each countries FSI Value by the total sum, expressed in percentages.
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Why does this matter? As TJN says:
Financial secrecy is a key facilitator of financial crime, and illicit financial flows including money laundering, corruption and tax evasion. Jurisdictions who fail to contain it deny citizens elsewhere their human rights and exacerbate global inequality.
The issue of secrecy facilitating financial abuse is far from resolved as yet. The campaign to end it must go on.
‘Exactly’ is all I can say to this.
And our ambition is to be like Singapore…
Well, we do have the City of London.
I may have missed this. Where does the United Kingdom fit if one takes the dependant secrecy jurisdictions into account? No. 1 possibly?
TJN has a blog out on this today, I think
I may repost it later: right now I am on a train with limited signal
What mathematical factor in this index consistently puts Germany very high up this list? How does it rank so high, above the UK and all the usual associated territories? And why do we never see people campaigning to close down tax haven Germany?
All the data is there for you to read
Just follow the links
And for the record, TJN does talk about this, not least in Germany
What would be a perfect score? Zero? Is that realistically achievable? What is the best score that any country have ever achieved?
… wait, so the UK’s Secrecy Score of 42 is joint-best with Slovenia, out of the 112 countries included. (What happened to the other 80-odd?) Better than Belgium, Sweden, Norway, France, …
Isn’t that something to celebrate?
The UK only appears to do particularly badly against three criteria – 4 (which seems to be related to the Land Registry not being searchable online for free) and 5 (lack of publicly available information about membership and accounts of all limited partnerships) and 10 (use of the Legal Entity Identifier).
So, all we need to do now is persuade the the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, and all of our other friends, to be as good as we are. No?
Except we defend their right to continue to abuse
And we don’t need to persuade them: we have the right to legislate for them
The UK can use its colonial power to overrule their internal self-government and legislate for them, yes. In much the same way as Westminster could legislate in matter that have been devolved to the Scottish Parliament or Welsh Assembly.
But I see I should have mentioned a further criterion, number 13, which is about whether a jurisdiction taxes overseas interest and dividends or grants unilateral tax credits for foreign tax. Presumably the bad score there is related to the remittance basis.
For all that the report fulminates against Perfidious Albion, the UK actually get a good score. There is no country that does any better.