BERMUDA and other tax havens are now directly in the sights of a new organisation, Tax Justice Network (TJN), formed in response to what it sees as "harmful trends in global taxation, which threaten states' abilities to tax the wealthy beneficiaries of globalisation".

Writing in Tuesday's UK , Duncan Campbell reported that John Christensen, co-ordinator of the new global TJN secretariat in London, was unimpressed by efforts to improve the global image of the more mature offshore centres.

"While a number of havens, such as the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, have improved regulations," wrote Mr. Campbell, "the effect of this has been, in the view of Mr.Christensen, to legitimise them. 'Merely chasing out the worst havens and setting international standards for the better ones does little to address the real problems', he said."

Mr. Christensen, a former economic adviser to the Jersey government, who has also worked at the former UK Department of Overseas Development and Oxfam, said many of the havens were now "locked in desperate competition. They like to suggest that they oil the wheels of global capital, but there is no case for that. What has happened is that tax havens transfer the burden of tax away from capital and towards labour and the consumer."

In the reliably left-leaning Mr. Campbell reported that, according to the TJN, "Billions of pounds, enough to pay for the entire primary health and education needs of the world's developing countries, are being siphoned off through offshore companies and tax havens.

"Aid organisations are alarmed that money which should be used for building the infrastructure of the poorest countries is being hidden in havens by corrupt politicians and multinationals exploiting tax loopholes."

Sani Abacha, the former President of Nigeria, is reported to have had a standing order to transfer $15 million of stolen funds to his Swiss bank account. In 1999, weekly estimated that African leaders had $20 billion in Swiss bank accounts alone, twice the amount that sub-Saharan Africa spends on servicing debts.

"Tax avoidance also breeds other unethical habits, " wrote Mr.Campbell." When Enron was investigated in 2001, it emerged that it had 881 offshore subsidiaries, 692 incorporated in the Cayman Islands. The change has been assisted by technological improvements in communication and the liberalisation of the marketplace."

Major charities are also concerned about the situation.

"The implications of tax avoidance on development are manifold," said Tim Peat, 'economic justice' campaigner at 'War on Want'. "While transnational corporations endeavour to hold on to cash by shoring it up in tax havens, millions are lost that could have been used in the fight against poverty."

"Every time we investigate corruption in the oil industry, we find that looted public money has been laundered through offshore tax havens," said Gavin Hayman of Global Witness, the international resource watchdog group.

"Billions of dollars pass from public to private hands this way with no comeback. The collateral damage to the licit international system and to international development is truly enormous, and the only people who benefit are those who have something bad to hide. Tax havens are the seedy backstreet bars of the financial world, where corporations and multi-millionaires huddle in shadowy corners to pursue their business out of sight of respectable citizens."

In more measured and diplomatic tones, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, has also expressed concern about the diversion of funds to offshore centres. Confirming that Mr. Annan saw the issue as a priority, a UN spokesman said: "The Secretary General has indicated repeatedly that he believes money should be spent on development rather than going offshore."

Mr. Christensen of the TJN secretariat believes that the UN has a vital role to play in tracking the money.

"The remedies have to be global and the UN is the only body able to do it," he said." The WTO (World Trade Organisation) has failed."

Reporting to his British readers a fact well known to the residents of the island, Mr. Campbell wrote that, "Tax havens have also attracted the attention of John Kerry, the US Democratic party's presidential candidate, who has indicated that if elected he will pursue the companies that hide their profits abroad. In April, the US General Accounting Office said 61 percent of US corporations paid no federal income tax in the late 90's. Tax havens contain only 1.2 percent of the world's population and 3 percent of the world's GDP, but 26 percent of assets and 31 percent of the profits of US multinationals are held there."

As a result of that successful US corporate "tax planning", Marc Lopatin, writing in May in the , informed the readers of that august organisation's house magazine that, "US corporate tax receipts as a percentage of the overall tax base were at their second lowest ever in 2003, accounting for 7.4 percent, or $132 billion, of federal receipts."

"It is difficult to label this as anything other than aggressive tax planning," complained Mr. Lopatin in the Paris-based , whose editor had earlier decried such practices as "socially unacceptable".

"So much so," continued Mr.Lopatin, " that the actual rates of corporation tax being paid are beginning to be flagged up as a central measure of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Previously, CSR was limited to mitigating the social and environmental risks incurred by high-profile multinationals operating in the developing world.

But in recent months, pressure groups and NGO's have started to recognise a financial dimension to CSR. The argument goes that the fair and transparent payment of tax is at the heart of the social contract between business and civil society."

"The perceived injustice of corporations paying well below the effective tax rates in countries where they operate," proposed Mr. Lopatin, perhaps optimistically," could reverberate louder and longer as a citizenship issue.

"A recently established coalition, the global Tax Justice Network, believes this amounts to a hidden fault line running through the reputation of high profile multi-nationals. If so, it is conceivable that tax performance could become a source of operational risk, as critics of big business begin using CSR to leverage a boardroom response, while demanding governments investigate revenue shortfalls."

"This is not a comforting scenario for the publicity-shy, multi-billion dollar tax planning industry," wrote Mr. Lopatin. "Its work may be legal, but explaining away hundreds of millions in non-tax payments through the creative deployment of transfer pricing, avoidance vehicles, and tax havens should, at the very least, make for an entertaining addition to company CSR statements."

According to global TJN, offshore companies are being formed at the rate of about 150,000 a year. While in the Seventies there were just 25 tax havens, there are at least 63 now, "about half of them British protectorates or former colonies." Tax avoidance in Britain alone is estimated, very imprecisely, "at between ?25 billion and ?85 billion."

The latest Oxfam report on tax havens, on which Mr.Christensen worked, suggested that the amount "secreted" in tax havens was equivalent to six times the estimated annual cost of universal primary education and almost three times the cost of universal primary health care.

Mr.Campbell concluded with a brief, if somewhat plaintive, history of some unintended consequences.

"Allowing British protectorates or former colonies to set themselves up as tax havens was also an attractive proposition for Britain in that it allowed those places to become self-sufficient. Now, the whole process has accelerated to the extent that billions of pounds are being removed from the countries that need them most."