Financial Transparency Coalition

The lux leaks saga moved up a couple of gears last week. First of all, a large number of MEPs broke ranks with their leadership to publicly back a European Parliament committee of enquiry into the so-called ‘sweetheart deals’ that Luxembourg concluded with hundreds of multinational companies to minimise their tax bill. The Parliament’s political decision-making body, the Conference of Presidents, has yet to formally approve the enquiry but the genie seems to be well and truly out of the bottle now, even if there are reports that EPP deputies are being put under pressure to withdraw their signatures.  The enquiry...

Integrity, trust and culture can seem like the most intangible and abstract of concepts in a hard-edged business environment – until they disappear. As the finance industry has discovered in recent years, failing to tend to a culture of integrity can cost you dearly. There are the record fines of course – such as those meted out to Goldman Sachs, Barclays and UBS – and they have grabbed most of the headlines. But there is also the incalculable reputational damage, which in the longer term can have a very tangible impact in terms of lost customers, investment and contracts.

Where do multinational corporations go on their holidays, and how much money do they spend when they get there? Despite their global reach, Transparency International’s recent Transparency in Corporate Reporting report – which assesses 105 multinational companies’ anti-corruption reporting – shows that these companies reveal very little information about their financial and non-financial contribution to the countries in which they operate. The European Parliament is now calling for legislation to require companies to report financial information on a country-by-country basis.

EU ministers have finished their discussions of the extractive transparency proposals for now. While there was broad support for the principles that undelie the proposals, at least in public, there was a curious reluctance to apply that principle to themselves.