Which countries head the list for money laundering ?

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Dirty secrets: financial crime

Those looking to hide—or expose—ill-gotten gains will pore over the latest Financial Secrecy Index, published today by the Tax Justice Network, a campaign group. It ranks jurisdictions based on a combination of their level of legally enshrined secrecy and the size of their financial centres. The higher a country is on the list, the more vulnerable it is to money-laundering, corruption and tax-dodging. For all the recent focus on bringing tiny, palm-fringed islands to heel, several of the top ten will be nothing of the sort. Switzerland and Luxembourg are likely to feature, as is America. The financial superpower lectures (and prosecutes) the rest of the world but fails to practise what it preaches, offering anonymous shell companies as homes for tainted foreign cash and often refusing to reciprocate when other countries share information on banks’ American clients. No surprise, then, that America’s offshore sector is booming. If you’re big enough, double standards pay. Here is the list but you can see the full article on the link.

1.	United Kingdom and its Territories
2.	Switzerland
3.	United States
4.	Hong Kong
5.	Singapore
6.	Luxembourg
7.	Germany
8.	Taiwan
9.	United Arab Emirates (Dubai)
10.	Lebanon
11.	Panama
12.	Japan
13.	Netherlands
14.	Thailand
15.	Bahrain

What is the significance of this index?

In identifying the most important providers of international financial secrecy, the Financial Secrecy Index reveals that traditional stereotypes of tax havens are misconceived. The world’s most important providers of financial secrecy harbouring looted assets are mostly not small, palm-fringed islands as many suppose, but some of the world’s biggest and wealthiest countries. Rich OECD member countries and their satellites are the main recipients of or conduits for these illicit flows.

The implications for global power politics are clearly enormous, and help explain why for so many years international efforts to crack down on tax havens and financial secrecy were so ineffective, it is the recipients of these gigantic inflows that set the rules of the game.

Link to the full article

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