Financial Transparency Coalition

The High Level Plenary meeting on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will gather in the UN headquarters in New York from 20 to 22 September with a view to assess and accelerate progress towards the achievement of the MDGs. Prospects for such progress look gloomy since all MDGs are currently off-track. Heads of State and Government will need to move a step forwards and adopt ambitious commitments in order to meet the 2015 deadline. However, according to sources involved in the negotiation of the summit’s final outcome, this agreement is more likely to be a new compilation of abstract...

On the International Accounting Standards Board’s (IASB’s) website, many CSOs including Eurodad have contributed to the IASB Discussion Paper on extractive activities, arguing in favor of a comprehensive country by country reporting standard for the extractive industries, a standard currently being reviewed. There are also contributions from other stakeholders that are openly opposed to such a standard. Interestingly, the World Bank also made a very assertive contribution, which strongly supports a country by country reporting standard in the extractive sector. World Bank strongly backs PWYP Proposals on country by country reporting The entire submission from the World Bank...

A new IMF working paper entitled “Mining Taxation: an application to Mali” analyses the structure of the mining taxation system in Mali. It follows the regressive path set forth by the World Bank, consisting of attracting Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) by lowering royalty taxes in the gold mining sector at the expense of lower government revenues collected through these royalties. International gold prices have sharply escalated in the last decade, yet International Financial Institutions (IFIs) are still advising African countries to lower profit taxes and royalties to gold mining firms. They are overlooking the issue of transfer pricing abuse...