DIE: Public Lecture & Panel Discussion with Thomas Pogge & Raymond Baker on “Illicit Financial Flows and the post-2015 agenda”

The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) is pleased to invite you to the Public Lecture & Panel Discussion with Thomas Pogge & Raymond Baker on

Illicit Financial Flows and the post-2015 agenda

on Tuesday, 23 September 2014, 18:00–20:00 h at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) in Bonn. The event will be held in English.

Please register for the Public Lecture and Panel Discussion with your name and contact details at: presse@die-gdi.de

Tax abuse constitutes a massive headwind against development. One common form of it is trade misinvoicing, used by multinational corporations (MNCs) to shift funds to affiliates in other jurisdictions that tax profits at lower rates or not at all. Global Financial Integrity estimates that $4.7 trillion were thus siphoned out of developing countries during the 2002-2011 period, $760 billion in 2011 alone. This is five or six times the sum total of all official development assistance flowing into these countries during the same periods.

Despite the enormity of this issue, it is barely touched in the UN’s framework of the post-2015 agenda and the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from 2016. The present draft speaks vaguely of curbing illicit financial outflows from the developing countries (target 16.4) and of helping them improve their tax collection (target 17.1). But there are no specific demands on richer nations to stop facilitating this drain on development.

The lecture of Thomas Pogge & Raymond Baker will focus on the need of such reforms to curtail tax dodging as well as embezzlement, money laundering, and other criminal activities and thereby to enable developing countries to attain the revenues necessary to safeguard their citizens’ human rights. Such reforms would achieve much more than the foreign aid envisioned by the SDGs; and for many developing countries this step toward basic global justice would mean more than any amount of charity. Never before has there been so much popular support and political will to end the scandal of tax dodging. Pogge & Baker argue that we must seize this special opportunity to build a more transparent global financial system and thereby diminish a substantial impediment to development and poverty eradication.

Background:

Raymond W. Baker is an American businessman, scholar, author, and “authority on financial crime”. He is President of Global Financial Integrity, a research and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., working to curtail illicit financial flows. Mr. Baker is also a member of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa, chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki.

Thomas Pogge is the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and founding Director of the Global Justice Program at Yale University. Dr. Pogge is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science as well as President of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP), an international network aiming to enhance the impact of scholars, teachers and students on global poverty, and of Incentives for Global Health.

Source: Information by the DIE from 17.09.2014The German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) is pleased to invite you to the Public Lecture & Panel Discussion with Thomas Pogge & Raymond Baker on

Illicit Financial Flows and the post-2015 agenda

on Tuesday, 23 September 2014, 18:00–20:00 h at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) in Bonn. The event will be held in English.

Please register for the Public Lecture and Panel Discussion with your name and contact details at: presse@die-gdi.de

Tax abuse constitutes a massive headwind against development. One common form of it is trade misinvoicing, used by multinational corporations (MNCs) to shift funds to affiliates in other jurisdictions that tax profits at lower rates or not at all. Global Financial Integrity estimates that $4.7 trillion were thus siphoned out of developing countries during the 2002-2011 period, $760 billion in 2011 alone. This is five or six times the sum total of all official development assistance flowing into these countries during the same periods.

Despite the enormity of this issue, it is barely touched in the UN’s framework of the post-2015 agenda and the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from 2016. The present draft speaks vaguely of curbing illicit financial outflows from the developing countries (target 16.4) and of helping them improve their tax collection (target 17.1). But there are no specific demands on richer nations to stop facilitating this drain on development.

The lecture of Thomas Pogge & Raymond Baker will focus on the need of such reforms to curtail tax dodging as well as embezzlement, money laundering, and other criminal activities and thereby to enable developing countries to attain the revenues necessary to safeguard their citizens’ human rights. Such reforms would achieve much more than the foreign aid envisioned by the SDGs; and for many developing countries this step toward basic global justice would mean more than any amount of charity. Never before has there been so much popular support and political will to end the scandal of tax dodging. Pogge & Baker argue that we must seize this special opportunity to build a more transparent global financial system and thereby diminish a substantial impediment to development and poverty eradication.

Background:

Raymond W. Baker is an American businessman, scholar, author, and “authority on financial crime”. He is President of Global Financial Integrity, a research and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., working to curtail illicit financial flows. Mr. Baker is also a member of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa, chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki.

Thomas Pogge is the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and founding Director of the Global Justice Program at Yale University. Dr. Pogge is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science as well as President of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP), an international network aiming to enhance the impact of scholars, teachers and students on global poverty, and of Incentives for Global Health.

Source: Information by the DIE from 17.09.2014