French economist Gabriel Zucman is carving a reputation as one of the leading specialists on the growing business of organized tax evasion and the cost of tax havens to the public purse. Zucman, an assistant professor with the London School of Economics and a visiting scholar with the University of California, Berkeley, has just completed his latest study of this gigantic worldwide fraud, published in France under the title ‘La Richesse cachée des nations - Enquête sur les paradis fiscaux’ (The hidden wealth of nations -an investigation into tax havens). In this interview with Dan Israel, he presents his calculations of the staggering amounts of assets secretly stashed in tax havens across the globe, and offers his own proposals for tackling the problem.
Earlier this week, Kostas Vaxevanis, the editor of Greek magazine Hot Doc, which last year published a list of the names of more than 2,000 wealthy Greek individuals and companies with secret bank accounts in Switzerland, was finally acquitted for the second time by a court in Athens of charges of violation of privacy and breach of data protection laws.
