The report of African Union (AU) High Level Panel on IFFs chaired by former South African President, Thabo Mbeki, in 2015 has since established that up to $60 billion is lost every year, leaving Africa illicitly.
The Pan African Conference (PAC) on Illicit Financial Flows, being organised by the Tax Justice Network of Africa (TJNA) and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UN-ECA), will focus on the emerging attempts to “recast and reshape the IFFs narrative and methodology and what this would signify for the struggle against IFFs from Africa and more broadly for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.”
To underscore the importance of the event, the conference is being organised in partnership with the Independent Commission For the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT), the Tax Justice Network (TJN), Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) and the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ).
The Nairobi conference, which is the fifth edition of the annual conference seeks to provide a forum for policy actors from Africa and across the globe to articulate positions and propose solutions towards curbing IFFs from Africa.
The conference will also provides opportunity to take stock of the success made so far and challenges facing African governments in their efforts to honour their commitments to stem IFFs through the implementation of the High Level Panel recommendations.
A key outcome from the fifth PAC will be a declaration by TJNA and its partners re-affirming their fight for tax justice and a call to implement the recommendations of the AU High-Level Panel on IFFs from Africa.
Stakeholders have frowned at efforts to confine the definition of IFFs to criminal and outright illegal activities such as money laundering, corruption and theft of state assets, while excluding the issue of corporate tax avoidance.
According to ICRICT, if such efforts succeed, they would seriously undermine the progress achieved so far, particularly in Africa which has continued to play a leadership role in the efforts to curtail IFFs.
It stated that corporate tax avoidance represents a substantial portion of IFFs and as harmful to development as thee other types of IFFs.
Removing corporate tax avoidance from consideration, the commission said, would remove much of the focus on the commercial component of IFFs which according to the High Level Panel report, accounts for up to 60 per cent of IFFs from Africa.
Meanwhile, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), gathered journalists together for a one-day training on IFFs and Tax Justice National Campaign in Abuja.
The focus was to ensure that journalists in Nigeria understood the intricacy of IFFs and tax justice, to enable them report accurately on the issues involved. The aim was to mobilise Nigerian workers behind the campaign.
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