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Coalition supports strike against corruption and poverty

04 October 2020 Issued by the C19 People’s Coalition. The C-19 People’s Coalition unreservedly supports the spirit and the demands of the national strike of 7 October. The reasons are indisputable. South Africa, even before the Covid-19 crisis, was already becoming poorer. A quarter of our people suffered from extreme poverty. Government presided over one Read more >

Africa can clamp down on illicit flows by using AUCPCC effectively

By Sabeehah Motala Illicit financial flows (IFFs) are costing Africa $30-billion to $40-billion per year and have eroded African countries’ tax bases, hampering their abilities to respond effectively to Covid-19 emergency needs. Lockdown, states of emergency, and all the accompanying implications mean that developing states are more vulnerable than ever to the possibility of illicit Read more >

What is a tax haven? Offshore finance, explained

In May 2020 Mauritius, curiously one of the African countries that perform well on the annual Corruption Perceptions Index, was listed by the European Commission (EC) as a high-risk country for money laundering and funding of terrorism. It was joined on the revised EC list by Botswana, Ghana, and Zimbabwe, among others. The former is Read more >

Namibia removed from list of tax havens

Original source: Reuters European Union (EU) finance ministers removed Namibia from the bloc’s blacklist of tax havens on Tuesday after it committed itself to changing its tax rules and practices, the EU said. The Economic and Financial Affairs Council established the list in December 2017, with the overall goal of improving tax good governance globally Read more >

Global financial secrecy revealed in the 2018 FSI

The 2018 Financial Secrecy Index (FSI), an initiative of the Tax Justice Network (TJN), was launched recently. The FSI ranks jurisdictions according to their secrecy and the scale of their offshore financial activities. It shies away from being political, positioning itself instead as a tool for understanding global financial secrecy, tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions, Read more >

How does money laundering work?

Money launderers make use of numerous twists and turns in their efforts to hide their trails, but how does the process really happen? Here’s how. Money laundering is exactly what the words describe – washing the ill-gotten gains of their illegal origins so that what is left cannot easily be traced back to the original Read more >

Panama Papers and offshore tax havens

With Hanna Ziady First published on Moneyweb Image by Mark Lewis Corruption Watch’s executive director David Lewis spoke to financial journalist Hanna Ziady of Moneyweb on Monday, regarding the implications of the leaked Panama Papers, a story that had broken over the weekend. Read the transcript below: Hanna Ziady (HZ):  It has been described as Read more >