UK accused of failing on anti-corruption pledges

The government is falling short of its pledges to crack down on corruption, the chair of the cross-party international development select committee said.

Labour MP Stephen Twigg's scathing attack came after the government on Monday rejected a host of recommendations made by the committee following an international anti-corruption summit in London last year, hosted by David Cameron.

Among the recommendations were plans to:

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• Introduce country-by-country reporting of multinationals' profits and payments;
• Force British overseas territories to create public registers to end tax secrecy, and
• Reconsider the role of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as the principle international forum for discussions and decisions on tax.

Twigg said the MPs on the committee were working hard to respond to the challenges corruption presented in places such as South Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan

But he added: "Unfortunately, the wider government seems to be falling short of the promises it made at the anti-corruption summit last May."

Last year, the committee warned a lack of transparency in its overseas territories "will continue to damage Britain's reputation as a leader on anti-corruption".

It added that attempts to reduce corruption in developing countries were "in danger of being undermined by a lack of policy coherence and the pursuit of different policies by other sections of government", says The Guardian.

At last May's summit, Cameron, then prime minister, described corruption as "the cancer at the heart of so many of the problems we need to tackle in our world".

The month before, he had been hit by the release of the Panama Papers, which linked his father to the use of trusts in the British Virgin Islands, a tax haven.

Labour MP Dame Margaret Hodge, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on responsible tax, later accused the government of "pushing back" against reforms drawn up by the OECD to tackle global tax avoidance.