Naomi Fowler: Hello, and welcome to the Taxcast from the Tax Justice
Network, our podcast about corruption, tax abuse, financial secrecy, and how
we fix it. I’m Naomi Fowler. Coming up later, a new real estate secrecy index:

Alex Cobham: Real estate is not the only high value asset that you can use to
hide illicit flows, but it’s certainly one of the easiest and one of the most
attractive.

Naomi Fowler: We’ll find out which countries are the world’s worst offenders.
Before that: we’re often frustrated by misreporting in the media, sometimes just
downright disinformation about taxes and all the politics around taxes.
Recently, we met someone who tackles it head-on, and he’s had a lot of success:

Alan Williams Key: They, they can’t get away with this. It’s, it’s a victory. It’s a
small victory for truth.

Naomi Fowler: He gets just as annoyed about misrepresentations as we do.
We’ll get back to him in a moment. And wealth taxes are a perfect example.
Every time taxing wealth is in the spotlight, the same claim always comes up.
You can’t tax wealthy people because they’ll leave. And a couple of years ago,
media across the world reported on a supposed millionaire exodus because of
taxes. It was all supposed proof that you can’t tax the wealthy fairly. Here’s my
frustrated colleague, Mark Bou Mansour, at the time:

Mark Bou Mansour: Millionaires did not, and are not fleeing countries to
escape taxes. It’s based on a report published by a firm called Henley & Partners
who help sell golden passports to the super-rich. Golden passports were ruled to
be unlawful by the European Court of Justice, thanks to a challenge by the
European Commission, which said golden passports impose a serious risk of
corruption, money laundering, tax evasion. Our review of the Henley & Partners
report shows that there are several issues with the report’s methodology, its
sample, and its reporting. But what the media reported and what governments
listened to was a fiction based on questionable data published by a firm that
helps the super-rich buy their way out of rules that apply to everybody else.
It’s frustrating. I know from our own research how rigorous we are with our data
and with transparency. And, you know, when I reach out to a journalist, I share
Excel sheets, I share methodology documents, I share direct sources, I put them
in touch with a researcher. It’s a lot of work just to show the credibility of the
research and so on. We’re using methodologies that are peer-reviewed, you
know, that are established in academia.

Naomi Fowler: And yet, along comes Henley & Partners and they get their
story uncritically reported across the world’s media. Here’s Mark again:

Mark Bou Mansour: About 11,000 news pieces were published around the
world in 2024 by some of the most-read and most-watched news outlets
claiming that droves of millionaires were fleeing countries in record numbers.
This was a huge exodus, we were told, with economic consequences, and the
root of it all was supposedly taxes on the super-rich. But here’s what all this
media reporting left out. These record numbers of millionaires leaving
represented just 0.2% of all millionaires. In other words, almost 100% of
millionaires did not move to another country, yet somehow this was spun a full
180 into an exodus. Scare stories like these are used to block the positive
change people want.

Naomi Fowler: It didn’t take our data experts long to debunk these claims. Our
analysis showed even using Henley & Partners’ own estimates that millionaire
migration is actually going down. It’s proportionately smaller than migration
rates in 2016, 2017, and 2018. But that didn’t stop inaccurate media reporting.
It’s great PR if you’re in the business of selling golden passports to the superrich, advising countries on setting up schemes like that, and pressuring governments not to tax wealth more fairly. Anyway, one person who got as annoyed as us about elements of this scare
story is this man. The audio quality’s not the best, but we really love what he’s
doing, and it’s really worth a listen:

Alan Williams Key: I’m Alan Williams Key. Uh, I’m retired. I used to work in
IT. I’ve had a strange career. My training was in theoretical physics which I, I
did at Cambridge. My first job was in experimental physics. I left experimental
physics and I joined a software house and never looked back really. The first
thing I did when I retired, I said, “Well, how am I gonna keep my brain active?”
I trained as a jazz saxophone player while I was living in Spain, and it got to the
point where I was in three different groups, and we were meeting each week,
and it was great fun.

One of the things that I did, having retired, for fun, was to start looking at
newspaper websites, really just to keep myself informed, I thought. But then I
discovered that the tabloids wrote some quite risible stuff. I set up a small
WhatsApp group of friends and family and I would share my musings on there,
sort of putting up the headlines and making a joke about it, either, you know,
the bad grammar or the ambiguity, and then it must have been towards the end
of 2024 I suddenly started reading headlines that really annoyed me. It would
have been after the general election, and all of these papers were writing the
most awful rubbish. And I thought, “Well, how can they get away with this?” I
thought, “No, they, they can’t get away with this.” It was not so much truth, but
fair play, and they were not playing fair. And that’s when I thought, “Okay, let’s
look at how to complain about the press.” And that’s when I thought, “Well, this
headline is so awful I’ve got to complain about it.” So I tried, to see what would
happen. And they took my complaint and we followed through with the
newspaper and they had to issue an apology. And I thought, “Well, this is– this
could be fun.”

Naomi Fowler: Alan continued having his fun, and he started chalking up a lot
of successes too. In 2025 alone, 12 of his complaints about breaches of the
editors code just for one newspaper, the Daily Express, were upheld by the
regulator, IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

Alan Williams Key: It was, yes, anger at what was being published on these
websites. What I’m hoping is to get corrections. Any headline that looks like it’s
been sensationalised, that’s always a good start point. What annoys me is where
they put an erroneous headline out on the front page, the homepage of the
website or the news page of the website. And these particular papers are aimed
at the sort of people who quite possibly will not even read the article. They
might just read the headline and think, “Oh, that’s what they’re up to.” And I
would, I would really like them to stop that. I want them to be forced to publish
corrections.

Having read a lot of these articles on the websites, there are trigger words that
get my interest. So things like fury or anger or chaos, I think, “Ah, is there
anything in this article that’s actually going to substantiate that, or is that just
editorial opinion, and exaggeration?”

Naomi Fowler: Alan is prolific. He might not like me saying this, but he’s
become a complete expert on how IPSO works. Again, that’s the regulator, the
Independent Press Standards Organisation:

Alan Williams Key: I started sometime in 2024. For the whole of 2025, I did
work it out that I was doing about three a week, so that year is 150 to 200, say.
And I’ve had so many complaints now that I, I have to clear them off of my
computer, well, off my email. It’s all stored on the email, of course, ’cause that’s
how we communicate, and so I had to get rid of all of that. Um, uh, I really only
keep the live ones now.

It’s quite straightforward. Once you’ve found the IPSO website, it provides you
with an online form, and you just fill in all the fields which includes you filling
in the headline, a link to the article on the web– online and what your complaint
is. I had to read the editor’s code and understand it, and so then point out what
the actual problem was with what’s being printed or online printed, and then just
wait for them to reply.

There’s a time limit, twenty-one days, and if they haven’t responded to you
within that twenty-one days it means they don’t think you’ve got a valid
complaint, so if you want to follow up, you have to then ask them to review
that.

Naomi Fowler: Alan had so many live complaints, he really had to organise
himself so he could keep on top of how many days had passed since each
complaint he’d filed, so he could take further steps to ask why the regulator
hadn’t responded.

Alan Williams Key: I had to get more organised. And I set up a lot of folders
in my email- one for each complaint. So they’re all tracked, and I have to name
the folders with the, the deadline, the date deadline, to remind myself to contact
them if I haven’t heard anything. So it’s hard work actually, in the last week, I’ve
probably generated, oh, it’s gotta be getting on for 15.

Naomi Fowler: Once IPSO has accepted that a complaint is valid, they relay
that to the complaints department at the newspaper for their response:

Alan Williams Key: They will then come back with their answer, usually
denying that there’s anything wrong. They come back to me, so we open a
private discussion between the newspaper and myself. Uh, they come to me and
say why they think there’s nothing wrong, or they offer a correction which I
think is okay. Sometimes I have accepted it and the correction is printed and the
case is closed. Sometimes I say, “Well, that correction isn’t adequate.” And they
say, “Well, we think it is.” So then it goes back to IPSO. Or we just never get
near to agreeing a pre-investigation, correction or whatever. So then the IPSO
officer reviews everything and sets everything up really so it can be reviewed
by the official committee, and they will adjudicate.

Naomi Fowler: What drew our attention to Alan and what he was doing was
that one of his complaints that was successfully upheld was the millionaire
exodus story published in January 2025, which used the Henley and Partners
figure. He smelled a rat.

Alan Williams Key: What I, I did was I researched the people who had put the
information out, which was being reported by the Express, and I read who they
were. Um, I obviously realised that these were people who were advising
wealthy people on how to emigrate and where to, so they had a vested interest
in this, that was clear. But that only got me so far. I then had to just do a search
on people leaving the country, immigration, emigration. And I got to some
government figures or some official figures, and I could see that it didn’t really
stack up with what they were saying. And in any case, the biggest problem was
the newspaper was reporting people leaving the UK in 2025. And when I looked
at it, the report was dated, I don’t know, June! How could they have the figures
for who was leaving by the end of the year on statistics that were only six
months old for that year? That report was being used by The Express, it was
clear that this was a forecast. I said, “Well, you can’t be reporting the rate that
these people are leaving were leaving was going to go up based on a forecast.
That, that’s a complete nonsense!

Naomi Fowler: He was absolutely correct. It was nonsense. His complaint on
that was successful. The Daily Express had to publish a correction. I’ll put a link
in the show notes so you can read his complaint. It’s a thing of beauty really.
And our Tax Justice Network data experts have easily pulled apart various
millionaire migration claims from Henley & Partners. Alan’s found that complaining about press reporting when it comes to evidence and opinion is tricky.

Alan Williams Key: This is one thing I have discovered about IPSO and the
Editors ‘ Code. You can’t stop the newspaper from publishing what they want to
publish. If there are two sides to a story and they only publish one side, they’re
entitled to do that. It’s called editorialisation. And you can’t complain about it.
Uh, they choose what to publish. So long as what they publish is accurate, not
misleading, not distorted, they can do it. So I’ve learnt a lot about what you can
and cannot complain about. The one area that I’m picking up quite a lot on now
is hidden embedding of opinion, which they’re not allowed to do. You can
publish opinion, but you have to say this is an opinion. And the way that they
always trip over this is in the headline, and they all do it. They all just throw
these opinions into the headline because they want to be sensational. They want
to grab your attention, and they want to get you to click on the article, and they
trip themselves up by putting in these, these opinions. They don’t do the
research that they should. I, I do the research that they should, which allows me
to provide the complaint.

Naomi Fowler: I asked him for his advice for people wanting to complain:

Alan Williams Key: Read the editor’s code very carefully. Make sure you
know what newspapers are allowed to do and what they’re not.

Naomi Fowler: It’s very good advice because after speaking with Alan and
hearing about his experiences with the press complaint system in the UK, for a
successful complaint, you have to be very focused. My colleague Mark again:

Mark Bou Mansour: Under Clause 1 on accuracy of the Editor’s Code,
specifically Subclause 1, the responsibility is that publications must take care,
that’s the wording, to not publish misleading statements or misinformation, and
so on. So as long as, you know, a paper can be said to have been careful in
checking the accuracy of a report before publishing it, if the statistic it publishes
is inaccurate, that’s not on the paper , right? As long as, you know, they
attempted to check it. Where they would be considered in breach of the clause is
if they inaccurately represented that statistic, so not if that statistic was
inaccurate, if it’s an external statistic, so that’s how that kind of works.

Naomi Fowler: Another thing Alan’s discovered is that there are limits even to
his reach globally when it comes to complaining to IPSO:

Alan Williams Key: People like The Express, The Mail, The Sun, they’re all
newspapers that have sister publications abroad in other countries. If you want
to complain about a newspaper, you can only do so if it relates to activities or
people in the UK, or events in the UK. And that cuts out an awful lot of what
you can complain about. Uh, for example, December 2024, the Express
published this article saying the Eiffel Tower was on fire, and they had this AI
picture of the Eiffel Tower and flames licking up the whole height of the Eiffel
Tower. And I wanted to complain about that, and I realised I couldn’t ’cause it’s
in France. Uh, the next day or two days later, it became clear all there was, was
there was some smoke at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower in one of these
buildings, the ticket office or a restaurant or something and they jumped to this
conclusion, said, “Oh, the Eiffel Tower’s on fire.” And somewhere on the
internet, they found this wonderful AI-generated image of the Eiffel Tower in
flames. The argument is these newspapers, these particular newspapers write
articles for local audiences in other countries and just reprint them on the UK
website. And yet I still can’t complain about it.

Naomi Fowler: Alan’s noticed something else over all his time making
complaints to IPSO. More people are doing it:

Alan Williams Key: When I started, and the longer it’s gone on, the worse it’s
got. It’s picked up this year. There’s quite an interesting statistic I’ve got here for
you. Um, so last year, in the whole of 2025, IPSO received somewhat less than
7000 complaints. Uh, I know that because every complaint they attach a unique
reference number to it and it happens to be just a numerical sequential. So 6593
dash 2025, that would have been a typical sort of reference number this year,
and we’re only halfway through the year. They’ve had over thirty thousand and
there was a huge peak, so I was looking at my numbers and just tracking them
through the calendar, a huge peak after the local elections, and they were going
wild in the papers and there’s a big peak now as well and I think that’s to do
with the far right trying to stir up racist attitudes, and that’s causing a big
backlash as well. So yeah, over 30,000 compared to 7000 in the whole of last
year.

I think IPSO are completely overwhelmed, and I’ve noticed that they don’t
respond to any of my complaints within the deadline they’ve set themselves of
twenty-one days. I have to respond every time and say, “Please review this
complaint and tell me why it doesn’t represent a breach of the editor’s code.” So
then they have to attend to it.

Naomi Fowler: It all says a lot about how people feel about the supposed fourth
estate, the media, and how it’s often not functioning to keep democracies and
power in check. It also says a lot about the weakness of the press regulator in
the UK, and no doubt in other countries. And it says a lot about the way power
works in what’s often billionaire-owned press when it comes to accurately
reporting on things like wealth taxes.

Alan keeps on complaining.

Alan Williams Key: It’s a victory. It’s a small victory for truth. Yeah. And I, I
feel good that they’ve had to grovel and make an apology. Good that they’ve you
know, they’ve had to correct that but it’s a hollow victory. It will be months after
the original publication, and you think, “Well, good. They, they had to publish a
correction,” but will it make a difference? Probably not, ’cause nobody’s going
to read it. It’s not a real solution – it would really need something to stop them
doing it in the first place. And I don’t know what that answer is. You know, the
ordinary person, all they’ve got is the route through IPSO, and sometimes it can
take between three and six months to get that correction printed, by which time
anybody who might have read the first headline and thought, “Oh, that’s what
the government’s up to,” will probably not even read the correction because
they’re never attractively presented with a photo or something. They’re just a
bland background, a plain colour, and these words saying “A correction.” And
the actual details of the correction often don’t even appear on the homepage.
You have to click on the link to find out what the correction is, which is quite
unsatisfactory. The damage has been done.

Naomi Fowler: It’s true that often the damage has been done. But every time a
press complaint is upheld, this is what happens from the journalist’s side of
things. This is Leo Schick. She works with me on the Tax Justice Network
podcasts, but she also freelances for all sorts of media, and this is what she’s
seen for herself:

Leo Schick: Often when I freelance I have an email assigned to my name so I’m
logged into like the staff emails, the ones that everyone gets. I do know that in
at least one workplace, two now that I think of it, that you get corrections that
are sent round and so those correction emails they send, there’ll be multiple
items in an email, ‘this is what we got wrong. This is the correction that we’ve
issued.’ Which means, I mean, I’m not saying all journalists go through all these
correction emails and you know, assiduously read every single one but it does
mean that there is a correction in their inbox and it’s really clever way, I think,
of reaching a lot of journalists in a very short amount of time.

And then also, you know, if, if they’re gonna go and make the same mistake
again, then there’s a kind of bar there of like other people at the organisation
would’ve seen that correction and they hopefully don’t want it to happen again.
And so that issue is hopefully rectified.

I’ve worked in a news agency as well, which feeds to other parts of the press
and a correction in those circumstances is a really big deal because what you are
selling is your accuracy and your attention to detail and fact. And if you get that
wrong, the correction has to go out very fast and very clearly to clients so that
they’re not then printing it in their outlets as well.

Everyone gets stuff wrong. It happens. But yeah, like if I was an editor, I would
want people to be saying accurate things and not inaccurate things, especially if
you’ve got a repeat offender. I don’t know, there might be places where they’re
like, they love that, but I haven’t come across these places.

Naomi Fowler: There’s no doubt that some of the media that’s owned by
billionaires who don’t like paying taxes are not gonna be too bothered about
corrections about stories like the myth of the millionaire exodus, which is
particularly hard to shift. But maybe, just maybe, complaints like Alan’s doing
combined with the actual evidence the Tax Justice Network has tried so hard to
get out there does have a kind of drip, drip effect. Here’s Mark on the changes
over time he’s observed in Henley & Partners’ annual reports and their claims
around millionaire migration:

Mark Bou Mansour: They have backtracked on the use of the word exodus. It
doesn’t appear in their press release, and they’ve published an article alongside
or as part of their report sort of raising questions about what an exodus means
and, you know, word choices and so on. They’re not saying we were wrong to
use it, they’re just sort of questioning its use, which is sort of the best we could
have really hoped for, I think. Um, it is a bit comical. You know, their, their
response is, “Well, after we were criticized, we had to refer to a dictionary to
check what exodus actually means.” And, you know, they’re saying it means a
mass departure. And to quote, they’re saying, you know, “Philosophically, is
around 1% of a population really a mass departure? It depends on what the
newspaper wants to make a story out of.” So obviously, no, this is not a mass
departure. Um, but hey, you know, it’s, you know, the best we could have hope,
hoped for from Henley & Partners. We could have hoped for a lot more from
the press, which is to drop the exodus framing, which they haven’t.

Naomi Fowler: But this year’s latest Henley & Partners report has taken a very
different approach:

Mark Bou Mansour: After years of publishing these numbers about
millionaires supposedly migrating, they’ve completely dropped their numbers
and their claims about exodus. It’s now a report about how tax-friendly a
country is, which, you know, there are a dime a dozen of. And, you know,
surprise, surprise, their picks of most tax-friendly quote, unquote, places are the
same jurisdictions that top our Financial Secrecy Index ranking and corporate
tax haven index ranking. So it’s, you know, it’s nothing new. But what is
interesting is that they now admit that migration numbers are, quote, unquote,
“modest,” which is quite a step away from, you know, a, a global mass wealth
exodus kind of thing. They now say they’re not gonna publish them until there is
data to support such numbers, they even say that what methodologies exist can’t
be used specifically to measure millionaires for a variety of reasons, but they
don’t say their old numbers were wrong. They just say they don’t have the data
now to support numbers, right? And they haven’t just dropped those numbers.
They announced an audit last year of their report. They haven’t shared any
updates on how the audit went, but they’ve now dropped the numbers. They’ve
even dropped the sole researcher behind those numbers.

Naomi Fowler: One thing I would say is that I think, you need the Alans of this
world, and you need data expertise pushed in the right way to try to change
prevailing narratives, especially one that is so strong, which is that millionaires
will leave if you tax them more fairly. Um, and I would just say congratulations
to you personally because you have really pushed this, and I think that that
combination of pushing is eventually effective, even if it takes a long time.

Mark Bou Mansour: Thanks For that. Uh, well, it was a team effort, definitely.
You know, time spent holding Henley & Partners’ data a-accountable is time I, I
need to be spending on other research we’re putting out there. In fact, a lot of
our work that we did on the Henley report was done on weekends, and not just
by me, but other staff members, right? So it shouldn’t come down to us to sort of
stop a story of this scale that was so obviously false and incorrect, working
weekends to sort of make sure we get some kind of correction on this or some
kind of clarity on this.

I think your interview with Alan is really telling. It shouldn’t come down to a
retired scientist to hold the press accountable. You know, just from the Express
alone, Alan on his own has gotten 12 corrections. Um, y-you, you’d think that
would make a dent in the Express’s behavior. And you’d ideally want a regulator
that can make it matter, to have issued 12 corrections like that.

It obviously matters because, you know, misinformation shapes our societies,
and in the case of the Henley and Partners report, it resulted in direct
policymaking decisions, you know, it was misinformation that was repeatedly
cited in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, right? And I think the
president of South Korea put it best when he was actually referencing our
response to the Henley Partners report when he called it anti-democratic.
Misinformation, fake news goes against democratic processes. You can’t have
proper democracy without pushing back against misinformation in the press.

Naomi Fowler: Absolutely. The system of regulation we have feels like
holding up a teaspoon in front of a tidal wave when you can see, you see how
easy it was to spread incorrect claims about millionaires migrating.

Mark Bou Mansour: Yeah. According to Hacked Off, who campaign for a free
and accountable press, about 1% of complaints to IPSO actually get upheld.
IPSO is a self-regulating body, right? It’s made up of folks from within the
industry. I know Hacked Off are campaigning around a better media bill. The
Media Reform Coalition have called for a public media commons. There’s lots
of really interesting and important proposals out there. Obviously, a regulator
with more teeth, an independent regulator that can really make it matter when a
paper has a systemic pattern of publishing misinformation, would make a
difference.

MUSIC BREAK

Naomi Fowler: Finally, on this episode, real estate, or property is a great way
to launder money. But to be able to do it, you need certain levels of ownership
secrecy and other special conditions. And our latest Real Estate Secrecy Index
is part of a rolling update to the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index.
That ranks the countries most complicit in helping individuals hide their
finances from the rule of law. So why did we decide to focus on real estate
ownership transparency this year? Here’s Alex Cobham of the Tax Justice
Network:

Alex Cobham: There, there are really two reasons. The less interesting one is
that rather than doing a complete update of the index every couple of years,
we’ve moved to rolling updates. So we choose particular indicators to update
every few months or so, and update those. And so this time, one of the main
indicators that was updated was the set of indicators around the transparency of
real estate ownership.

But the other reason to have picked this and to focus on it is because it’s
becoming a growing policy issue. The United Kingdom, for example, later this
year is planning an illicit financial flows summit, and one of the major elements
of that is understood to be a focus on the transparency of real estate ownership.
Real estate is not the only high value asset that you can use to hide illicit flows,
but it’s certainly one of the easiest and one of the most attractive. And so when
we focused in on this area in this update of the Financial Secrecy Index, we
created a sort of sub-index, a real estate secrecy index, to just look at how
important the secrecy provided in the real estate sector in different countries
around the world is.

And perhaps not surprisingly, the United States comes top of this index also.
But we see some other jurisdictions, not least the United Kingdom, um, itself,
which scores relatively well on the overall secrecy score, but on real estate,
significantly worse. And that puts it up to, to eighth position in the Real Estate
Secrecy Index. And the UK, you know, knows and has known for a long time
that it has a problem with high value offshore purchases of UK real estate that
have been anonymous for many years The UK is taking some steps, you know,
it has now a register for offshore owners that is a step towards greater
transparency of this, to some extent perhaps a model for others. But there’s also
clearly still work for the UK to do, and I, I think the UK government’s well,
well aware of this and seized of the importance of doing so. And with this
summit, I think they’re trying to push forward both nationally but also
internationally perhaps, a higher standard around the transparency of real estate
ownership. And that’s a really important measure because as I say, so often we
find anonymous ownership of real estate is a significant part of networks and
transactions of corrupt and criminal financial flows when we have
investigations that can unravel them. So we really need transparency here across
the board simply to make this, this important sector much less attractive for, for
people intent on carrying out illicit financial flows.

Naomi Fowler: I’m gonna run through the top 10 offenders in our Real Estate
Secrecy Index for you. So the United States, you’ve already heard, is number
one with weak to non-existent transparency laws, earning them the worst
possible score. Number two is Canada. Number three, Australia. Number four,
India. Number five, Mexico. Six, Indonesia. Seven, United Arab Emirates.
Eight, United Kingdom. Nine, Italy, and 10, Malaysia.

We’ve got some interesting examples where countries are doing well, even
scoring zero, so that’s perfect transparency, that’s just related to this area of real
estate. That includes Denmark, Slovenia, and Luxembourg. Surprising when it
comes to Luxembourg, since Luxembourg’s still a major offender when it comes
to financial secrecy services in other sectors there, but they’re more willing, it
seems, to address transparency risks in real estate. Don’t get us wrong,
Luxembourg’s still a major player when it comes to anonymous ownership of
other financial assets and income streams. It is number seven in the Financial
Secrecy Index. There are some interesting efforts as well that Alex is seeing
from other governments:

Alex Cobham: The Spanish tax authority is currently working at a high level
with artificial intelligence to make the best use possible of the data that they
have, and they have among the best data access in the world. We are very close,
you know, although obviously we, we have many concerns about artificial
intelligence, but this seems a pretty clear, strong use case to put in practice
exactly the kind of work that the Tax Justice Network has been doing with tax
authorities around the world, including across Africa, but making it as efficient
as possible to use all of the data that is held to cross-reference different sources,
from country by country reporting, to the accounts that companies file, to their
tax returns, to individuals’ tax returns, to trade data, customs data, and so on. To
put this together in such a way that even relatively limited capacity tax
authorities, and perhaps especially those, are able immediately to identify the
biggest risks of tax abuse, the biggest revenue risks, and to focus their efforts
there.

Simply putting this in place, you know, we know from all of the evidence over
the years, when tax authorities are using data well, and when taxpayers know
that authorities have the data and are using it, the rate of compliance multiplies
upwards. People simply stop behaving badly in a great many cases just because
that data’s there. So we know that the benefits of this in terms of revenue are
very large.

Naomi Fowler: In the end, the inequities when it comes to access crucial
information between the richer country members of the OECD and poorer
nations of the world are too great to fix anywhere except at the United Nations.
Next month, in August 2026, is the latest round of negotiations towards a UN
tax convention. Those really are the best chance of reform of global tax rules to
the benefit of all nations.

Alex Cobham: All of this is within reach if the UN tax convention delivers on
that ambition, and that requires particularly the OECD member countries to
recognise that this is the only just and effective outcome, and that they have to
stop this, this clinging on to the, their own rich countries club at the OECD and
trying to pretend that that can deliver inclusive benefits. It can’t. It can’t even
deliver full benefits for OECD members because the United States is so intent
on distorting it. You know, it’s in everybody’s interests, including even the
citizens of the United States, to have a UN tax convention that finally delivers a
globally inclusive rule-setting body where we can all benefit from transparency
and from setting rules that work for everyone, and that’s, that’s the road we’re
on.

Naomi Fowler: You can read all about the Real Estate Secrecy Index and other
updates to the Financial Secrecy Index in the show notes. Special thanks to my
colleagues, Leo Schick, to Mark Bou Mansour, and to Idriss Linge of our
French podcast, Impôts et Justice Sociale. And extra special thanks and
appreciation for Alan Williams Key. That’s it for now. Thanks for listening.
We’ll be back with you in September. Bye for now.