Government official held secret meetings, gave advice to pro-tax haven lobby group
Leaked documents from the IFC Forum, a lobby group funded by 11 of the world’s biggest offshore law firms, reveal unreported meetings with senior Canadian officials.
2013 was a bad year for tax havens.
In April, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released its first global exposé detailing secret offshore bank accounts of hundreds of wealthy elites. Only months later, then-U.K. prime minister David Cameron announced he would force shell companies to divulge their real owners.
It was a one-two punch: bad press and a threat to the secrecy tax havens rely on.
Enter the IFC Forum, a lobby group funded by 11 of the world’s biggest offshore law firms, whose business relies on the secret flows of cash through what they call “international financial centres” or IFCs. The group went on a PR offensive, meeting with government officials from a half-dozen countries, pitching stories to the Financial Times and appearing on the BBC World Service to extol the virtues of tax havens.
And they got a little help from a senior civil servant in Ottawa.
Documents from the Paradise Papers leak, obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with the ICIJ, the Star and CBC/Radio-Canada, reveal secret meetings between representatives of IFC Forum and senior Canadian bureaucrats, one of whom offered strategic advice on how to promote their pro-tax haven agenda.
While then-prime minister Stephen Harper was telling the world that Canada supported the global effort to impose transparency on offshore tax havens, Duane McMullen, the director general of the Trade Commissioner Service at Global Affairs Canada, was advising the tax havens on how to fight back.
“Implement ideas provided by Duane McMullen . . . who participated as a lunch speaker by phone,” state the minutes to the IFC Forum’s monthly meeting on March 3, 2014. “i.e. disseminate the idea that IFCs lubricate global commerce which helps poverty reduction.”
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