Mr. Shaxson will be expanding on his views of "tax havens" at the 9th Annual OffshoreAlert Conference, which will be held at The Ritz-Carlton, South Beach in Miami Beach, Florida on April 4-6, 2011.

He will participate in a session entitled 'OFCs or Tax Havens: Good or Bad for the Global Economy'. Others, including former Cayman Islands Monetary Authority Chairman Tim Ridley, will argue that offshore financial centers actually benefit the international financial system.

Full Conference details can be found at www.OffshoreAlertConference.com.

Far from being "dead", as is popularly believed, bank secrecy is actually still "vibrant", according to the author of a new book on offshore "tax havens".

In comments to OffshoreAlert, Nicholas Shaxson criticized the world's major countries – and the media – for starting and perpetuating the "myth" that there was a new era of bank transparency.

"In April 2009 G20 leaders declared that the era of bank secrecy is over, and mandated the OECD to launch a crackdown with a black, white and grey list of tax havens," said Mr. Shaxson.

"Much of the world's media believed the hype. Unfortunately, the blacklist system turned out to be a whitewash. A few pinpricks have been made in the opacity, it is true, but basically the OECD's standards of information exchange are so pitifully weak that the secrecy system is pretty much as vibrant as ever."

That is bad news for anyone interested in helping developing countries, Mr. Shaxson told OffshoreAlert.

"Tax havens are probably the biggest single reason why poor countries stay poor," he said. "Global Financial Integrity's latest research highlights $1.25 trillion in gross illicit flows out of developing countries – ten times the value of foreign aid flowing the other way. The net flows are not much smaller. Imagine how many Latin Americans stash their tax-evading funds in Miami or New York; then imagine how many Americans would choose Latin America as the location for stashing their tax-evading funds - and it becomes clear that international financial secrecy fosters a large net one-way flow from poor countries to rich. And of course it undermines governance and democracy, and has created a giant international hothouse for cross-border crime."

Large countries such as the USA and the United Kingdom are as much to blame for "problem" as smaller but, perhaps, more widely-criticized "tax havens" such as Bermuda, Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, said Mr. Shaxson.

"Tax havens are popularly supposed to be small, palm-fringed islands, with Monaco and Switzerland thrown in for good measure," he said. "This stereotype is the big lie, which helps explain why the offshore phenomenon has been so misunderstood, and assumed to be a small, exotic side show. The truth is that the world's biggest tax havens include some of the world's biggest economies – the United States, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Ireland, and so on. Tax havens are at the heart of the global economy. That's what we need to now understand.

"Tax havens are corrupting international capitalism by essentially providing one set of rules for wealthy elites and insiders, and another set for the rest of us.

"They are distorting markets. Multinationals get to out-compete more nationally-based smaller firms that can't access the same abusive tax strategies. But this has nothing at all to do with the healthy competition in free markets that we read about in our economics text books. This is wasteful, inefficient competition: the result is not better products in the market place, but instead a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to capital owners. There is nothing 'efficient' about having one set of rules for big multinationals, and another set for smaller companies.

"Corporate managers face a dilemma: are they answerable only to shareholders - in which case they focus on aggressive tax minimisation, see tax purely as a cost, and get to free ride off the taxes paid by everyone else? Or are they answerable to a wider set of stakeholders - in which case they see tax as a distribution to society? Under a conventional view, many people assume the former. But why should corporations get to free ride off the rest of us? The financial crisis has thoroughly discredited the notion that the most 'efficient' economic system is one where the tax burden is shifted downwards from the wealthiest sections of society towards the poor. There is nothing at all 'efficient' about the offshore system."

Mr. Shaxson is the author of the recently-published "Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World". He will be expanding on his views of "tax havens" at the 9th Annual OffshoreAlert Conference, which will be held at The Ritz-Carlton, South Beach in Miami Beach, Florida on April 4-6, 2011.

He will participate in a session entitled 'OFCs or Tax Havens: Good or Bad for the Global Economy'. Others, including former Cayman Islands Monetary Authority Chairman Tim Ridley, will argue that offshore financial centers actually benefit the international financial system.

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