Thomas Pogge Quotes

Our international banking system allows banks to accept funds gained from tax evasion and other crimes and thereby facilitates and encourages embezzlement by public officials, especially in developing countries, as well as tax evasion and tax avoidance by multinational corporations.

Corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion are global problems, not just challenges for developing countries.

Corruption and illicit financial flows are different. But they really must be twinned. This is because, for practical purposes, it is an eminently more sensible approach to treat most of the sources of illicit financial flows as corrupt activity, within a broader use of the term.

Reliable numbers about the amount of dirty money around the world are difficult to come by. But according to an estimate by the nonprofit Global Financial Integrity group, $1 trillion vanishes from the developing world's economies every year.

As she was about to run for president in 2008, Clinton opposed a free-trade agreement with Panama - an agreement that, as Sanders pointed out, would make the kind of money-laundering we learned about from the Panama papers even more pervasive.

Cyprus has a reputation as a laundromat for the Russians who are trying to avoid sanctions.

Changing much-cherished bank secrecy laws is worth the effort. Corruption, tax evasion, and the capture of natural resource revenues undermine the rule of law, weaken the social fabric, erode citizens' trust in institutions, fuel conflict and insecurity, and hamper job creation.

The Latin American debt that reached crisis levels from 1982 would have been sharply reduced by return of flight capital - in some cases, overcome, though all figures are dubious for these secret and often illegal operations.

Why do tax havens exist? Because rich countries allow them to. If the U.S. came down on tax havens in the same way they come down on countries that trade with Iran and Cuba, we'd have no tax havens in the world.

Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime.

It's interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring.

There will be huge scandals because there is too much money washing around …. And we don’t know who’s behind it.

A very small proportion of the country's black money is in the movie industry. Because we are written about, public attention is focused on us. Do you think there is no black money in other businesses? With the exception of government servants and others who have tax deducted at source, there are tax evaders in every walk of life.

Plutocrats worldwide have readily understood the advantages of evading the burdens of the nation-state.

Shell companies can be owned by other shell companies; opaque offshore vehicles are carefully designed so that regulators can't identify who is using them; with the right accountants, they can be set up quickly and easily.

The black money issue should not be misunderstood as one of merely avoiding taxes. It is, in fact, a major systemic crime of denying the nation's financial system the proceeds of wealth. Such denial should actually be declared as treason, where opportunities to share the wealth for the benefit of the poor are wilfully denied.

There is nothing inevitable about this secret offshore world. It is not a fact of nature: Our laws created tax havens, and our laws can also end them. We could forbid Goldman Sachs from owning opaque offshore vehicles. We could prevent companies such as Cadre from accepting anonymous investments.

If you look around in London, there is a lot of dirty money. People see it as a safe haven: a bolthole to rely on if they are criminal or politically exposed in their own country.

We shouldn't be encouraging people to set up Cayman Island funds.

I'm tired of seeing the press equate Monaco with money laundering.

It isn't only rich countries that suffer from the effects of tax havens. Developing countries also lose billions of dollars in tax revenues due each year because wealthy individuals and some companies use tax havens to move assets and income offshore.

Much of the shadow banking sector, a major contributor to the economic crisis, was also only possible because of taxhaven secrecy.

We will also target tax evasion and off-shore tax havens... Everyone must pay their share.

I do not think we should tax people to a point where they are looking for tax loopholes and getting their money out of the country.

A holding company is the people you give your money to while you're being searched.