Tax transparency: Keeping the public in the dark?

I had the pleasure of spending a weekend in Amsterdam recently and, sitting by the historic canals in the late Autumn sunshine, it was hard to imagine the city as anything other than elegant, prosperous, and well-ordered.

But it was not always so.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, its golden age a distant memory, Amsterdam was in fact a nest of political corruption. Public offices were openly bought and sold and nepotism was rife. One of the city’s regents – the oligarchs o...