Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

French civil society organisations have last month published a brochure about Tax and judicial havens
By combining arrangements able to hide the origin of funds and a refusal to cooperate with the international community in tax and criminal investigations, the tax and judicial havens offer a privileged interface between the world of legitimate financial transactions and money of criminal origin. They therefore constitute an encouragement to international bribery and to the development of criminal networks: money from the drug trade, from prostitution, from terrorism, arms trafficking, flags of convenience, etc. It comes as no surprise, then, that they have been used on a large scale in the majority of financial scandals of the last few years (e.g. Enron).
The brochure rates the harmfulness taking into account various criteria: banking secrecy, no or little taxes, easiness to create companies, practice of trusts, limited judicial cooperation.

As far as the centres in the framework of this blog are concerned the rating is the following (the higher the figure out of 100, the more harmful the country):

Gibraltar: 94,90
Cyprius, Liechtenstein, Guernsey, Jersey: 89,80
Isle of Man: 88,10
Monaco: 86,45
Ireland: 76,35
Switzerland: 76,20
Malta: 79,70
Luxembourg: 69,8

The authors observe that the ratingis based on a subjective assessment of the legal framework and that the relevance of the veight given to each criterion my vary depending on the goals of the "user" of the tax haven.

Read the brochure (French)