Banking and Finance Law Commons^™

Memo To The Sec On The Proposed Rule On Disclosure Of Payments By Resource Extraction Issuers, Perrine Toledano

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

CCSI strongly supports the transparency of contracts and tax flows. CCSI shares the belief of many stakeholders that transparency is essential to leverage extractive industries for sustainable development and is in the mutual interest of all stakeholders. However, some industry players continue to voice the concern that increased transparency would be harmful for their business. Therefore, CCSI is working to also establish the business case for transparency.

In one such case, some industry players have been lobbying against the regulations developed by the Security and Exchange Commission to implement the mandatory disclosure provisions of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform …

Extending The European Debt Discussion To Broader International Governance, Odette Lienau

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Although Europe is no stranger to sovereign debt troubles, the focus of international debt governance for several decades has been on the developing world. Discussions surrounding the efficacy and appropriateness of crisis mechanisms have been shaped by this political reality. But the current focus on Europe itself may generate changes in how public and private actors view international debt governance and the legitimacy of crisis mechanisms. In these remarks, I will focus on two ways in which Europe might serve as a test case for broader governance practices. First, I will discuss the ramifications of the European Union’s potential adoption …

My Brother's Keeper: An Empirical Study Of Attorney Facilitation Of Money-Laundering Through Commercial Transactions, Lawton P. Cummings, Paul T. Stepnowsky

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, various “gatekeeping initiatives” have been introduced through inter-governmental standard-setting organizations, such as the Financial Action Task Force, as well as through federal legislation in the United States, which seek to apply the mandatory customer due diligence, record keeping, and suspicious activity reporting obligations contained in the existing anti-money laundering regime to lawyers when they conduct certain commercial transactions on behalf of their clients. The organized bar has argued against such attempts to regulate it, in part, due to the lack of empirical data showing that, as a threshold matter, lawyers unwittingly aid money laundering in a significant …

Vat Fraud: Mtic & Mtec - The Tradable Services Problem, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

Tradable services – VoIP termination services, mobile minutes, software as a service (SaaS), or almost any service bought or sold in the “cloud” – are a distinct class of taxable supplies. These service-based supplies both resemble and differ fundamentally from goods. They also differ from services that are consumed-on-purchase (consumed services).

Tradable services are designed from the beginning for re-sale. They are hybrid supplies that behave commercially like goods, but have functional attributes that make them hard to distinguish from services generally. When determining the place of supply/ place of taxation for these kinds of supplies, their hybrid character presents …

Public Participation And The Private Sector: The Role Of Multilateral Development Banks In The Evolution Of International Legal Standards, Daniel D. Bradlow, Megan S. Chapman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This paper systematically describes the public participation standards currently applied by multilateral development banks (MDBs) to the private sector and seeks to identify emerging trends and areas for further development or improvement. It begins by outlining the developing body of international law on public participation and its relationship to good development practice. Thereafter, the paper describes the two principle models for standards attached to MDB funding and assistance to the private sector: (1) the World Bank policies applicable to the public sector; and (2) the International Finance Corporation (IFC) standards that are applicable to the private sector and how these …

Greek Debt: The Endgame Scenarios, Mitu Gulati, Lee C. Buchheit

Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps Greece -- a country with a debt to GDP already approaching 150 percent and set to move even higher -- avoids a debt restructuring. Perhaps not.

What are the possible scenarios if Greece cannot return to the capital markets to refinance this gargantuan debt stock once its EU/IMF bailout package expires in two years time? What would a Greek debt restructuring look like after mid-2013? And (sharp intake of breath here) what would happen if such a debt restructuring were undertaken before that point?

Sovereignty, Accountability, And The Wealth Fund Governance Conundrum, Anna Gelpern

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Sovereign wealth funds – state-controlled transnational portfolio investment vehicles – began as an externally imposed category in search of a definition. SWFs from different countries had little in common and no particular desire to collaborate. But SWFs as a group implicated the triple challenge of securing cooperation between deficit and surplus states, designing a legal framework for global capital flows, and integrating state actors in the transnational marketplace. This Article describes how an apparently artificial grouping of investors, made salient by the historical and political circumstances of their host states in the mid-2000s, became a vehicle for addressing some of …

Is It Greek Or Déjà Vu All Over Again?: Neoliberalism And Winners And Losers Of International Debt Crises, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

The global financial meltdown and the Great Recession of 2007-2009 have brought into sharp relief the uneven distribution of gain and pain during economic crises. The 2009-2010 debt crisis in Greece resulted in a windfall for financial institutions at the expense of taxpayers, a rollback of welfare systems, and the impoverishment of the working classes. This outcome is consistent with the pattern that has emerged in the international debt crises of the last three decades, including the Latin American crisis during the 1980s and the Asian crisis during the 1990s.

The recurrent international debt crises of the last three decades …

Consultation And Legitimacy In Transnational Standard-Setting, Caroline Bradley

Articles

No abstract provided.