Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

Last 25 September 2007 , HMRC held a meeting with representatives of up to 100 financial institutions in connection with offshore evasion by UK bank customers holding offshore accounts.

HMRC’s pursuit of suspected offshore evasion by UK bank customers with offshore accounts is now expanding in scope, beyond the five major UK banks targeted hitherto

PwC has reported the meeting and especially the fact that HMRC accepted the legal constraints faced by some banks with subsidiaries in countries with banking secrecy laws, such as Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Luxembourg and that the Isle of Man also has laws which could impede disclosure and the fact that there has been doubt as to whether HMRC could override foreign secrecy laws and force banks to disclose information held by a foreign subsidiary.

As Richard Murphy observed, when bank secrecy is used to assist crime (and tax evasion is a crime) then those countries that provide it are parties to that crime, and so are those who defend the secrecy arrangements that they offer?

Francine McKenna has twenty-plus years of experience in the professional services environment, including tenure both in the US and abroad at PwC, KPMG/BearingPoint, JP Morgan and Jefferson Wells/Manpower.
She has created a blog that focusses on auditors for the reader

- to know how big four firms especially really work, to understand the conflicts and inherent pressure that they are now under in the age of globalizaton and government regulation

- to understand the reasons why his (her) investment, his (her) employer, his (her) customer, or his (her)vendor "suddenly" collapses in scandal or bankruptcy without warning from the firms charged with seeing through the games that self-serving executives will play

- to learn more about the interconnectivity between the firms, their clients, and the other players in the financial markets - the regulators, the rating agencies, the lawyers, the consultants, the bankers and the politicians

- to enlarge his (her) perspective in an entertaining, surprising and, sometimes, unpredictable way

Go to the blog

I was amused to look at the web site of the "Chambre des Députés" (parliament) in Luxembourg to see the questions to the goverment.

This lists all the questions. I could not help but smile to note the list was emptied:

So reassuring to know that they’re doing the job to control the goverment like in any democracy.

But so indicative of what really is happening in the Center: sensitive questions about corruption (of which one last July considered as urgent that should have been answered in one week but that apparently was not ... early October before the list was emptied). The reality is that they do not like transparency on issues.