“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

Longish thread on the shutting down of journalism (and whistleblowing) that makes people uncomfortable…
1/ When @TaxJusticeNet was getting started in the early 2000s, @jechristensen56 and others were opening up a whole new area
2/

A big win for the corporate secrecy lobbyists, as Germany moves to block public country-by-country reporting at the EU taxjustice.net/2018/07/13/why… via @taxjusticenet Context: the European Commission position, and the European Parliament's superior amendments, were awaiting the member states to join the trialogue and agree the specifics of public country-by-country reporting. But Germany has now moved to prevent this.

Here's a critique of the UK database entries of our Financial Secrecy Index, from a lawyer at Clifford Chance - one of the world's ten biggest law firms (per Wikipedia). And what follows is a response on the points raised.

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by @DanNeidle view original on Twitter

To begin, we really value expert feedback. We had a nearly two-year review process before the Jan.2018 release, which we were delighted to find brought in a great many stakeholders, including experts, users and subject jurisdiction policymakers..

1. Are advanced tax rulings just a mechanism to corrupt the normal application of tax rules to multinational companies? (A quick thread as work avoidance) 2. The attraction, on paper, is that multinational companies get certainty about (some) tax treatment; as do tax authorities, who can then focus their limited resources elsewhere.

So... It's out! The Financial Secrecy Index 2018, the @TaxJusticeNet ranking of secrecy jurisdictions globally financialsecrecyindex.com
(I'll thread some of the #FSI2018 media coverage here) First up, our great friends at @ICIJorg : icij.org/blog/2018/01/u…
#FSI2018