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Christian Hallum

13 Nov 2014 15:20:34

Hidden Profits – a new report coordinated by Eurodad – exposes the policies that keep transnational companies’ profits untaxed. Coming hot on the heels of the recent leak from Luxembourg exposing corporate tax deals, the report finds that an important part of the tax dodging scandal is corporate secrecy. The report recommends a public register of beneficial owners as a key solution. The EU can make this happen in its review of its Anti-Money Laundering Directive, but urgent action is needed to counterbalance resistance to this idea. Last week’s leak from Luxembourg – quickly dubbed ‘Lux Leaks’ – shone some rare light into the secret world of how transnational companies get away with dodging their tax bills. Transnational companies have saved billions of dollars in taxes by ...

Mathieu Vervynckt

04 Nov 2014 11:58:53

This blog first appeared on From Poverty to Power. The Third UN Conference on Financing for Development (FfD), set to take place in Addis Ababa next year, will be a crucial opportunity to discuss two of the hottest topics in development finance today: the use of scarce public resources to leverage the private sector, and the fight against international tax avoidance and evasion. Both topics come together in Eurodad’s new report, Going Offshore, though probably not in the way you might expect.  Previous Eurodad research has shown that despite the lack of public information about how they work and their impact on development, Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) – government-controlled institutions that support private sector projects in developing countries – have come to ...

Mathieu Vervynckt

08 May 2014 10:50:07

On 7 April, the World Bank Group published a report on the first year of implementation of its policy on the use of Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs) – commonly known as tax havens – in its private sector operations. The report, which comes after repeated calls from civil society organisations for a stronger policy, fails to include the necessary information to make a proper assessment of the Bank’s implementation efforts. Once again, it exposes the inadequacies of the current policy in terms of tackling tax evasion and avoidance.  The World Bank Group’s current policy, which was adopted in November 2011, requires its private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), to report to its Board of Directors on the implementation of its policy towards OFCs. This ...