“The British government is failing to live up to promises to tackle corruption, according to the chair of the international development committee, Stephen Twigg.
On Monday the government rejected recommendations made by the international development committee (IDC) in the wake of a major anti-corruption summit hosted in London last year by the former prime minister David Cameron. These included the introduction of country-by-country reporting of multinationals’ profits and payments.
The government also disagreed with other recommendations made by the IDC in its October 2016 report, Tackling corruption overseas, such as reconsidering the role of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as the principle international forum for discussions and decisions on tax.
In its response to the report, the government rejected the assertion that it was failing to persuade UK overseas territories that they should create public registers to end tax secrecy. It insisted that almost all relevant overseas territories and crown dependencies have given their support to an initiative launched by the UK for the development of a new global standard on automatic exchange of beneficial ownership information between countries.
Twigg said that the UK Department for International Development (DfID) was working hard to respond to the challenges corruption presents in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the world, in places such as South Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan.
“Unfortunately, the wider government seems to be falling short of the promises it made at the anti-corruption summit last May,” he said.
“Progress on the overseas territories has stalled, with the government showing it has no intention to lobby further for public registers of beneficial ownership.
“It is also disappointing that the government will not be making public the information it holds on how much profit UK-headquartered multinationals are making overseas and what payments they are making to national governments. Without this, citizens of developing countries will continue to be left in the dark about the extent to which corporations are able to make vast profits without paying the appropriate levels of tax. … ”
East Devon Watch 
Well, TM – PM’s Brexit strategy to attempt to mitigate the loss of Trade from Brexit is to attract multi-national corporations to the UK by low-levels of corporation tax.
Pursuing the IDC recommendations would sink this policy before it gets off the ground, so why should we be surprised by this?
Bottom line is that not only will they pay tiny levels of corporation tax on what they declare in the UK, but they will still be able to move money around in order to keep their declared UK profits way below reality.
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