“deference” to Wall Street. www.propublica.org/series/fed-tapes James S. Henry, a senior adviser to the Tax Justice Network and author of The Blood Bankers (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), discusses how tax havens and offshore banking cripple developing nations in a TEDx-RadboudU talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znYA0yIQMq0
2014 Eurodad releases a report titled Going Offshore: How Development Finance Institutions Support Companies Using the World’s Most Secretive Financial Centres. From the executive summary: “Developing countries lose billions of dollars every year through tax avoidance and evasion. Tax havens play a pivotal role in this by providing low or no taxation and by promising secrecy, allowing businesses to dodge taxes and remain largely unaccountable for their actions. Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) are government-controlled institutions that, as this report shows, often support private sector projects that are routed through tax havens, using scarce public money. By supporting projects in this way, DFIs are helping to reinforce the offshore industry as they are providing income and legitimacy.” www.eurodad.org/goingoffshore Eurodad releases a report titled Hidden Profits: The EU’s Role in Supporting an Unjust Global Tax System 2014. The report compares each country “with its fellow EU member states on four critical issues: the fairness of their tax treaties with developing countries; their willingness to put an end to anonymous shell companies and trusts; their support for increasing the transparency of economic activities and tax payments of transnational companies; and their attitude towards letting the poorest countries get a seat at the table when global tax standards are negotiated.” Findings include evidence that “practices which facilitate tax dodging by transnational corporations and individuals are widely used, in some cases so governments can claim to be ‘tax competitive.’ This is creating a ‘race to the bottom’ — meaning that many countries are driving down standards to try to attract transnational corporations to their countries. Some of the countries that have been most successful in attracting companies — Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — are also currently under investigation by the European Commission for making competition-distorting arrangements with transnational companies behind closed doors.” www.eurodad.org/hiddenprofits Global Justice Now releases a report titled Carving Up a Continent: How the UK Government Is Facilitating the Corporate Takeover of African Food Systems. The report describes how UK aid monies purported to “support improvements to agriculture and food security in Africa . . . are in fact geared towards helping multinational companies to access resources and bringing about policy changes to facilitate those countries’ expansion in Africa.” The report reveals evidence that “the pro-corporate approach of [such] initiatives . . . is likely to exacerbate hunger and poverty through increased land-grabbing, insecure and poorly paid jobs, the