To David Cameron: a letter from Africa

Zitto Kabwe MP, the chair of Tanzania's Public Accounts Committee, has written a letter (below) to UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

Dar es Salaam: Zitto Kabwe MP presents the letter to Prime Minister David Cameron to the British High Commissioner Dianna Melrose

The letter praises Britain for its "long and productive relationship" with Tanzania as a development partner, but then adds:

"This support is, however, dwarfed when the amount that Tanzania loses every year to tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance is taken into account
. . .
Some of this money is held in British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. Tanzania and other developing countries in Africa have been finding it hard to tame this trend because of financial secrecy laws.
. . .

In my district of Kigoma, western Tanzania, the maternal mortality rate is 933 out of every 100,000 live births. This trend is largely contributed by poor health services. The Government is incapacitated to provide better health services because of the low revenue base. Tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions are one of the fundamental reasons for this."

He urges Cameron to make this fight against tax havens a priority for the G8 summit due in Northern Ireland in June, and to place aggressive sanctions against British tax havens, a call for much greater transparency.
 
We have just blogged the scale of the problem, in a new report from the African Development Bank and Global Financial Integrity, estimating net illicit financial outflows from Africa of up to $1.4 trillion between 1980 and 2009.


The full letter is reproduced below, and the original is here.

Letter to Rt Hon PM David Cameron