The EU harshens its tone against tax evasion

John Christensen is director of the Tax Justice Network and David Spencer is a lawyer specialising in tax and banking law. They consider that "The Liechtenstein Affair could be a watershed in the fight against tax evasion, organised crime and corruption. ... The expanding credit crisis has helped underline the dangers of a lack of trans­parency in international finance, poor regulation and insufficient co-operation. Fighting tax haven abuses requires tackling all of these. Yet the world risks wasting this political capital on the wrong targets. ... The OECD's approach to tax transparency requires information to be exchanged with other jurisdictions only on request. In other words, you must know what you are looking for before you request it. This is shockingly inadequate. We need the automatic exchange of tax information between jurisdictions and all developing countries must be included."

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