Finance committee  I think the starting point is indeed transparency in reporting. I think that would take us a long way. If I can cite it, the British accountancy profession has recently done a report on this. It concluded that in the end the best enforcement was transparency: that companies had to get themselves in a position whereby they could defend and justify publicly what they had done, and that if they couldn't justify it publicly, then they probably shouldn't be doing it.

Finance committee  Yes. So there are both evasion and avoidance matters, and what can we do? I agree with the idea of whistle-blowers. I believe we need to have much stricter liability for establishing beneficial ownership on the law firms that set companies up. I believe we need to move to automatic exchange of information.

Finance committee  Yes, I think it would certainly concentrate the mind if you realized that you were losing a lot of money. My own work is largely on poorer countries and, of course, I favour investment in those poor countries, but investment that generates real activity. What you're seeing in the Cayman Islands and Barbados is not investment in real jobs for real people, just strategies to avoid and evade Canadian laws.

Finance committee  Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to the committee. As for my own credentials, I'm a professor of economics at the University of Oxford. I specialize in international economic issues, especially in the poorest countries. Prime Minister Cameron asked me to be the adviser on Britain's G-8, leading on tax issues.