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Martin Atkin

25 Jan 2018 14:38:46

You wouldn’t just hand your money over to someone else to invest without asking them what they were going to do with it, would you? If you were a public body, at the very least you’d want to make sure it wasn’t used in a way that damaged the environment or undermined human rights. Increasingly, however, there are concerns that development finance institutions (DFIs - government-backed institutions that invest in private sector projects in developing countries) - are lending money to private sector financial intermediaries (FIs) to invest in infrastructure projects in developing countries - without ensuring that proper environmental and social safeguards are in place. These intermediaries - private commercial banks, private equity funds and infrastructure funds - are essentially go-betweens ...

Jesse Griffiths

08 Sep 2016 14:19:02

How much public money does your country send to other countries, and for what purposes? The short answer is: we don’t know. The only reliable figures are those for the aid provided to help developing countries, collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and called official development assistance. Unfortunately, even these figures are confusing, as they include large amounts of money that never leave the donor country, such as administrative costs and and the costs of accommodating refugees. A better place to look than the headline-grabbing ODA figures is a less well-known measure, called country programmable aid which the OECD says is “a better estimate of the volume of [ODA] resources transferred to developing countries.” But what about other official flows ...

Christian Hallum

13 Nov 2014 15:20:34

Hidden Profits – a new report coordinated by Eurodad – exposes the policies that keep transnational companies’ profits untaxed. Coming hot on the heels of the recent leak from Luxembourg exposing corporate tax deals, the report finds that an important part of the tax dodging scandal is corporate secrecy. The report recommends a public register of beneficial owners as a key solution. The EU can make this happen in its review of its Anti-Money Laundering Directive, but urgent action is needed to counterbalance resistance to this idea. Last week’s leak from Luxembourg – quickly dubbed ‘Lux Leaks’ – shone some rare light into the secret world of how transnational companies get away with dodging their tax bills. Transnational companies have saved billions of dollars in taxes by ...