Several renowned economists, including Frenchman Thomas Piketty and American Joseph Stiglitz, urge G20 leaders in a letter to create a global asset registry to better target the hidden fortunes of Russian oligarchs.
The case of the Russian oligarchs is raging in the concealment of fortunes within opaque structures, say these economists in a letter published Tuesday in the British daily The Guardian addressed to the leaders of the G20.
They hold at least 1,000 billion dollars in wealth abroad, according to estimates relayed in the letter, signed in particular by the French Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, as well as the American Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, all members of the Independent Commission for the International Business Tax Reform (ICRICT), a think tank.
However, these fortunes are often hidden in offshore companies whose true owners are difficult to determine, they continue, adding that it is precisely on this wall of opacity that the efforts of countries to sanction them today come up against.
Several large Russian fortunes were targeted by Western sanctions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the president of the Chelsea football club Roman Abramovich or the boss of Rosneft Igor Sechin.
To go further, the ICRICT calls for the establishment of a global register of assets, making it possible to link all types of assets, companies and other legal structures not their legal owner, who is often only ‘a facade, but to the beneficial owner, the person who actually owns them.
In order to gain in effectiveness on sanctions and on all tax evaders in the world, it would thus be necessary to create a network connecting all the national asset registers of all the different forms of wealth that an individual can possess, where they already exist. This ranges from bank accounts, real estate assets, cryptoassets, works of art…
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Following the example of a measure proposed in December by the World Inequality Lab which depends on the Paris School of Economics, the signatories propose to the States to collect this information at the national level, then gradually to extend the cooperation to the regional and then global scale.
Much more needs to be done to reform a failing international financial system that is currently biased in favor of wealthy tax evaders, they write, acknowledging some progress in recent years.
The publication of this letter comes on the occasion of the G20 Finances on Wednesday which will bring together all of the richest countries in the world.