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Walgreens feels the heat, reconsiders tax flight
August 12th, 2014
14281884510_e63fd1c57b_z It all started last month when Walgreens, the iconic American pharmacy chain, announced that it would move its headquarters to Switzerland as part of a merger with the European chain Alliance Boots. The move, known as an “inversion”, essentially involves a company merging with another company that is based in a jurisdiction with lower taxes. Once they merge, the newly formed group will usually move its headquarters to the lower tax jurisdiction to avoid paying taxes in their home country. However, this move is usually a pure technicality, meaning that while the...
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Want to get rich? Pay taxes
June 23rd, 2014
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” He might well have said development. Regions that have experienced the fastest growth in the last fifty years have also had a tax base they could use to invest in the infrastructure of growth – roads, schools, and health. While some have argued that taxes impede growth, the long-term picture doesn’t sit well with that theory.
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Happy Holidays from the Financial Transparency Coalition!
December 20th, 2013
Happy Holidays from the Financial Transparency Coalition! This year has marked a true turning point for financial transparency. I’d like to take a moment to celebrate how far we’ve come: •In March, the European Union passed a directive mandating full country by country reporting for the banking sector. After a significant advocacy push, the European Council committed in May to extend this to all sectors in the future. •In May, Kofi Annan’s Africa Progress Panel made illicit flows a focus of its annual report, urging world leaders to tackle the problem and drawing attention to the fact that Africa loses twice...
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FTC Conference 2013 Preview: Why We're Here
September 29th, 2013
Illicit financial flows are one of the leading, and most under-appreciated, causes of poverty in the developing world. They erode taxes bases, facilitate crime and corruption, and represent a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich. Financial Transparency Coalition member Global Financial Integrity finds that developing countries lost US$859 billion to illicit flows—defined as cross-border movements of funds that are illegally earned, transferred, or utilized—in 2010 alone. And the estimates are conservative, since they fail to include important sources of illegal money, including cash movements, mispriced services, hawala networks and most transfer mispricing.
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