Bishop: End corporate tax evasion that is responsible for the deaths of millions of children in the developing world

The Bishop of Chelmsford has welcomed a report by Christian Aid which exposes the scandal of global, trade-related tax evasion. This will be responsible for 5.6 million deaths of young children in the developing world between 2000 and 2015. Christian Aid is calling on the UK government to take an international lead in pressing for reform through the removal of the secrecy that tax havens offer. It argues that companies should be made to publish their accounts on a country-by-country basis, which will mean that abusive practices can be quickly spotted.

The Bishop described Christian Aid’s Death and Taxes report as being rooted in vital Christian values and in the sense of the dignity of the human person and the totally unacceptable face of poverty in our world. The report turns around the old phrase, ‘no taxation without representation,’ he said, and raises a fundamental question: without taxation how can people be held to account and how are societies to develop best practice in equal and democratic values? 

“We are constantly questioning and attacking, for perfectly understandable reasons, the quality of governance in other parts of the world. What do we do to promote governance? We do nothing to promote the issues of governance if we do not tackle the issues of tax evasion, of the ability of the corporate sector to evade its responsibilities to the societies in which it is working and to build up that combination of economic and democratic participation by all the people that enables societies like our own to flourish. This is an important report.”

The Bishop of Chelmsford is the chairman of Christian Aid.

Read more about the report and watch the video of the Bishop’s speech

Print this page
Bookmark this page