Today, together with the general elections, Ecuador will hold a referendum on banning politicians and civil servants from having bank accounts or companies based in tax havens.
BBC Mundo publishes a thorough article (in Spanish) about why and how this “pacto ético” has repercussions much beyond Ecuador’s frontiers – with interviews of Tax Justice Network’s Alex Cobham and Pablo Iturralde, national coordinator of Ecuador’s CEDES (Centro de Desarrollo Económico y Social, member of Global Alliance for Tax Justice’s regional member Red de Justicia Fiscal Latinoamérica).
“All national controversy aside, says BBC Mundo, it is the first and only referendum about tax havens in an occidental democracy”. And the article cites the three main reasons for that matter:
- The problem is not Ecuadorian: it is global
- It could help disarticulate the symbiosis between economic and political power
- It gives society an opportunity to create un new socio-economic model”
You can read the full article here (in Spanish).
