Bangladesh ranks 52nd in Financial Secrecy Index 2022

Bangladesh has climbed up on the Financial Secrecy Index 2022, ranking 52nd out of 141 countries.

According to the Tax Justice Network's Financial Secrecy Index 2022, published on 17 May, Bangladesh has climbed two notches from the 54th position it held two years ago.

Financial Secrecy Index 2022, a global ranking of jurisdictions most complicit in helping individuals to hide their finances from the rule of law, noted that the supply of financial secrecy services, like those utilised by tax evaders and corrupt politicians, has continued to decrease globally due to transparency reforms.

Bangladesh held an FSI value of 232 which is a measure of how much financial secrecy the jurisdiction supplies, resulting from the combination of the jurisdictions' Secrecy Score and Global Scale Weight.

The report suggests that Bangladesh supplies 0.684% of the world's financial secrecy.

The Financial Secrecy Index ranks each country based on how intensely the country's financial and legal system allows individuals to hide and launder money extracted from around the world. The index grades each country's financial and legal system with a secrecy score out of 100 where a score of 0 is full transparency and a score of 100 is full secrecy. 

The country's secrecy score is then combined with the volume of financial services the country provides to non-residents to determine how much financial secrecy is supplied to the world by the country.

The 2022 edition of the Tax Justice Network's biennial Financial Secrecy Index sees some of the world's biggest economies climb up the ranking. The US has topped the chart this year earning the worst rating ever recorded since the ranking began in 2009. The country dramatically expanded the gulf between itself and the rest of the world by enabling the biggest supply of financial secrecy ever recorded by the index – nearly twice as much as the second biggest supplier currently on the index, Switzerland.

In South Asia, Japan, which returned to the top 10 in 2020, has continued to climb the index, now ranking 6th. India ranked 36th, Sri Lanka 50th, Pakistan 74th, and Maldives ranked 91st out of 141 countries.

However, a higher rank on the index does not necessarily mean a jurisdiction has more secretive laws, but rather that the jurisdiction plays a bigger role globally in enabling banking secrecy, anonymous shell company ownership, anonymous real estate ownership or other forms of financial secrecy. Such activities in turn enable money laundering, tax evasion and the evasion of sanctions. 

A highly secretive jurisdiction that provides very little financial services to non-residents, like Maldives (ranked 91st), will rank below a moderately secretive jurisdiction that is a major offshore destination, like Luxembourg (ranked 5th).