The Tax Justice Network will publish on Monday an index of the countries most to blame for promoting international financial secrecy. The goal of the index is to highlight the harm allegedly done by tax havens.
Unfortunately, Bermuda is seventh on the list (PDF) with Cayman coming in fourth.
Interestingly, the other top ten jurisdictions are the US state of Delaware, the UK’s City of London, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Belgium, Ireland, and Singapore.
The research – which comes ahead of the Group of 20 finance ministers’ meeting in Scotland next week – is an unusual attempt to measure whether powerful countries are as culpable over illicit fund flows as the offshore centres they have attacked since the financial crisis.
John Christensen, Tax Justice Network director, said the index outlined “a much more intricate story than has been told in the past about how financial markets have secrecy at their core”.
He said: “We like to think that liberalised financial markets are transparent. But when you dig deep into their arrangements, you find transparency is something of a chimera.”
The rankings are made by giving each of 60 onshore and offshore financial centres an “opacity score”, which is then weighted according to the jurisdiction’s significance in the world financial system.
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