Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

An interesting conference took place last Thursday, June 28, 2007 at the CSIS Conference Center of Washington DC . The topic was "Illicit Financial Flows: The Missing Link in Development".

Raymond Baker, Director, Global Financial Integrity, provided a couple of interesting definitions.

Tax havens – These are places where you can set up an entity—a corporation or partnership or trust fund—and then you can sell to that entity and that entity can sell to other entities, and you can structure the pricing in such a way that all or most of the profits are earned in the tax haven entity, and it doesn’t have to pay taxes or pays only minimal taxes on those profits. There are now 72 tax havens around the world.

Offshore secrecy jurisdictions – These are places, usually located within tax havens, where you can set up these entities behind nominees and trustees such that no one knows who are the real owners and managers of the business



The conference is online.

Cyprus, Ireland, Switzerland and Malta are the top (over 80% attractiveness) four countries in a league table of European tax systems, compiled by KPMG International, in which major business organizations across Europe assessed the attractiveness of their domestic tax regimes.

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Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House, said a couple of days ago in a TV interview. She denounced "the evasion of taxes of those CEOs of certain hedge funds and other private equity firms who are sheltering their income offshore".

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