Secrecy is a central feature of the global financial system. Jurisdictions compete with each other to provide it, in order to attract financial flows – with appalling effects elsewhere. It is essential to identify the worst culprits in providing this secrecy. But nobody has ever tried to do this in a systematic, objective way – until now.
The Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) creates a ranking which identifies the jurisdictions that are most aggressive in providing secrecy in international finance, and which most actively shun co-operation with other jurisdictions. It attaches a weighting to each jurisdiction, according to the scale of cross-border financial services activity that it hosts. The two measures – the opacity score, and the weighting, are combined to create the Financial Secrecy Index. Nothing like this has been done before.


Here is the ranking:

http://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/2009results.html


What the Index reveals

Most of the jurisdictions listed in the FSI have been described as tax havens. There is a tendency to think of the secrecy providers as “sunny places for shady people” - palm fringed Caribbean islands filled with shady law firms, luxury yachts and the brass plates of anonymous shell companies.

The FSI reveals a much bigger story. The major global players in the supply of financial secrecy are mostly not tiny, isolated islands, but rich nations operating their own specialised jurisdictions of secrecy, often with links to smaller ‘satellite’ jurisdictions which act as conduits for illicit financial flows into the mainstream capital markets.

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