Financial Transparency Coalition

By TJN staff and Mark Herkenrath, Alliance Sud We already blogged about the signing yesterday of the Swiss-German tax deal, and TJN's opposition to it. This blog goes into a little more detail than before, and outlines some of the salient points of the deal. This is something that matters a great deal - because several other countries are believed to be considering doing something similar. Which, in TJN's view, would be a grave mistake. (Our last blog also highlights the strange, even fishy-looking timing of this...

On p28 of the UK edition of Treasure Islands, I write: Almost no official estimates of the damage exist. The Brussels-based non-governmental organisation Eurodad has a book called Global Development Finance: Illicit flows Report 2009 which seeks to lay out, over a hundred pages, every comprehensive official estimate of global illicit international financial flows. Every page is blank. It’s a gimmick, but an important and telling gimmick. (Take a look at the picture: if you’re interested, the book’s cover looks like this). Now, for something I wrote yesterday on the TJN blog:

The Swiss government is about to conclude new tax deals with Germany and the UK. As was reported on the Task Force blog recently, and updated on the Tax Justice Blog, the Swiss withholding tax proposal poses a major threat to the EU's struggle for tax transparency.  In the meantime, reliable Swiss sources have revealed further details of the impending deals. 1. Germany and the UK will no longer require their citizens to declare their Swiss income. It's noteworthy that under the bilateral Swiss-EU Savings Tax Agreement, in force since 2005, Switzerland already charges a withholding tax (currently 35%)...

From India's Tehelka, an interview with Philippe Welti, Switzerland's ambassador to India, in a section where he talks about the origins of Swiss bank secrecy:

"The banks were comforted with the fact they could say no, we are under legal protection, we are threatened by punishment if we release data. That is the magic of Swiss banking secrecy and my job as an Ambassador, a representative of Swiss society is to remind the world that it risks turning into a dangerous place where the rule of law is abandoned. The thinking behind it, and the moral value of such a...