Suppliers of digital forensics tools to Myanmar’s police and military insist they cancelled software licences in 2018, after the Myanmar security forces perpetrated crimes against the Rohingya, and used cellphone extraction tools in the trial of two Reuters journalists. One US company, however, seems to have stepped into that market gap.
Exposing the political histories of international tax agreements is important, not because they’re necessarily scandalous, but because they simply show what’s really at stake: the economic and political interests behind these kinds of agreements, which massively shape and skew international financial flows, corporate structures, and government tax revenues.
It’s seven months since the incomparable Gaëtan Mootoo took his own life. Gaëtan dedicated that life to a travail de fourmi, ant-work, though on a grand canvas. As Amnesty International’s longest-serving Africa researcher, he spent over thirty years patiently documenting the ways in which individual named women, men and children have been affected by war, state oppression, poverty and violence across West and Central Africa. In the 1980s he gathered…
For all the assurances of the British Overseas Territories, law enforcement clearly don’t think they can get the information they want on who owns anonymous shell companies.
Governments say they want to stop global companies like Amazon and Google from booking sales in low-tax jurisdictions. Yet half of them don’t want to implement measures they agreed at the OECD would help do so.
Poorer and smaller economies were excluded from the table during OECD negotiations of global measures against corporate tax avoidance. Now they’re amongst the most assiduous implementers of these new rules. Meanwhile many of the large economies which did actually sit at the table are partly opting out.
The UK government has a clear way to “switch off” the already-supplied weapons systems that are making the Al-Hudaydah assault possible. Why doesn’t it use it?
What do we still not know about the functions, undisclosed military commitments and legal position of the thousands of British nationals and other employees of British companies supporting the Saudi Arabian military?
What if we could look inside kleptocrats’ bank accounts?
“I believe we should think again before doing anything.”