The concerns of the business community basically monopolised the first day of the meeting of trade and economy ministers of the G20 group of industrialised and emerging countries in this Mexican resort city Thursday.

B20 press conference in Puerto Vallarta. Credit: World Economic Forum

The meeting of global chief executives and chairmen held on the occasion of G20 summits, known as Business 20 (B20), handed the ministers a series of recommendations on issues like trade liberalisation, green growth, food sovereignty and energy, at the meeting in Puerto Vallarta, in the western state of Jalisco, 900 km from Mexico City.

And not only that: The corporate delegates were present at the minister’s deliberations on questions such as protectionism, fostering trade, and generating jobs.

“I have been at previous meetings, and this is the first time that I have seen the business representatives playing such an active role,” Alejandro Ramírez, a Mexican executive who owns the Cinépolis chain of movie theatres and who presided over the B20, said during the opening ceremony Thursday.

The G20 is made up of the members of the G8 leading industrialised countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States – along with Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey and the European Union.

But the meeting in Puerto Vallarta, a city on Mexico’s Pacific coast that depends mainly on foreign tourism, also included representatives of Colombia and Peru, which are asking to join the group.

Lima will host the Latin American chapter of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2013.

The two-day ministerial meeting, which is taking place behind closed doors and without the presence of civil society, was preceded Monday through Wednesday by the Latin American chapter of the WEF, where business leaders and experts once again discussed the survival of capitalism, in the face of the global economic crisis that has hit rich countries particularly hard.

The business community’s participation was more marked at this year’s meeting than it was during the bloc’s summits in Seoul, South Korea in 2010 and Cannes, France in 2011.

The business sector has taken over the G20 agenda, as it demands solutions in the face of the crisis.

“Trade and investment have played a critical role in the last decade” to stimulate the economy, Martin Senn, CEO of Zürich Financial Services, said Thursday.

At the meeting, Mexico proposed analysing global value chains and the links between trade, economic growth, and employment. But the hot issue was undoubtedly Argentina’s recent decision to regain state control over the YPF oil company by seizing a 51 percent stake from Spain’s Repsol.

“Non-tariff barriers are more complex to identify,” Senn said. “The G20 must stand against protectionism. They have to revise the impact of measures like barriers to exports, sanitary and fito-sanitary and technical barriers.”

Trade in goods and services has already felt the blows of the economic crisis that broke out in the United States, which have been aggravated by Europe’s debt problems.

The World Trade Organisation forecasts a low level of growth in global trade this year, and a sluggish recovery.

The growing influence of corporations in meetings like this week’s G20 gathering has fuelled criticism by civil society organisations with respect to the legitimacy of these international forums.

The International Coalition Facing the G20, made up of organisations from Brazil, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Greece, Mexico and Peru, said in March that the bloc’s approach to tackling the crisis is based on the same paradigms and mind-set that gave rise to it in the first place.

The G20 obsessively promotes unlimited growth – now ironically called “green” – which not only undermines a healthy environment and the resources shared by the people, but also the rights of nature and the earth’s sustainability, the group’s declaration states.

In the Pacific resort town of Los Cabos in northwest Mexico, the presidents of the G20 countries will discuss issues like policies against the financial crisis; food security; green growth; and the fight against climate change at their Jun. 18-19 summit.

Presenting the B20’s recommendations, Guillermo Ortiz, a former governor of the state-owned Banco de México, suggested the denomination of trade in currencies other than the dollar.

“We are moving towards a multi-currency world, and this must also be reflected in the denomination of trade,” said the banker, who is now chairman of the Grupo Financiero Banorte.

“It’s important for economies like China to represent the weight of their countries in international trade,” he argued.

The business leaders also proposed the creation of an oversight panel to monitor which countries have lived up to the proposals and later debate the results.

Swiss banks are facing prosecution in several European countries, accused of complicity in tax evasion and money laundering schemes, especially with French, German, and wealthy Greek citizens.

In France, the publication last March of a book revealing massive tax evasion by French citizens with the help of a renowned Swiss bank forced local judicial authorities to launch an inquiry into the practices of the financial institution.

On Apr. 16, a spokesperson of the French Public Prosecutor’s office confirmed to IPS that it had launched an investigation against the Paris agency of the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), under the charges of money laundering and tax evasion, among others.

The book by journalist Antoine Peillon, entitled ‘Ces 600 milliards qui manquent à la France – Enquête au cœur de l’évasion fiscale’ (‘Those 600 billion which France is missing – Inquiry into the heart of tax evasion’), reveals the methods the bank has allegedly used for years to encourage wealthy French citizens, from business people and high-ranking politicians to sports celebrities and artists, to evade taxes.

According to Peillon, who supports his claims with classified research conducted by the French secret services, interviews with former bank employees, and the bank’s own internal documents, UBS deploys a large clandestine team operating in France, with the sole task of wooing rich French citizens to use their services in attempts at tax evasion.

“Until last January, UBS had 120 clandestine operators in France,” Peillon told IPS. “Each of them used the so-called handbook of private banking, a veritable manual of tax evasion. Each of these operators keeps a hidden accounting system, colloquially called ‘carnet du lait’, French for ‘milk book’.”

“All these activities are well known among the different French police units,” he added.

Peillon estimates that French citizens and private enterprises held secret bank accounts at the UBS worth some 600 billion euros. “Since the year 2000, France has lost some 85 million euros in taxes per year as a result of these accounts.”

The conflict with France is but one of several legal disputes that have brought Swiss banks into confrontation with foreign justice systems.

Last March, Swiss justice authorities issued an international arrest warrant for three high ranking German fiscal officials, under the accusation of “complicity in economic espionage” and “violation of bank secrecy.”

On Mar. 20, German prosecution authorities received the official notification, in which Swiss justices demanded the arrest of the three German officials.

According to the German government, however, the three fiscal officials did not commit any crime – quite the opposite: they were pivotal in prosecuting thousands of German citizens guilty of tax evasion.

To prove their case, the three officials acquired, in 2010, an electronic data storage device containing information of thousands of secret bank accounts held by German citizens in Switzerland, to evade taxes.

With that data, the German finance ministry was able to prosecute and sanction more than 6,000 tax evaders, obtaining an additional tax income worth some 300 million euros.

Reacting to the Swiss arrest warrant, German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said that the three German officials had done “an excellent job.”

German opposition leader Sigmar Gabriel, president of the Social Democratic Party, even urged the government in Berlin to launch an international arrest warrant against Swiss private bank officials, for complicity with money laundering and tax evasion.

If “private banks (are) accomplices of tax evasion and money laundering they should be prosecuted by German justice, even if the banks have their headquarters abroad, and the crimes mentioned are also committed abroad,” Gabriel said.

Other European governments have recently complained that Swiss banks have been collaborating with wealthy citizens to evade taxes.

According to a list released by the Greek government last January, more than 4,000 Greek citizens evade taxes worth 14,877 billion euros, representing seven percent of the national economic activity, or 60 percent of the total public deficit of 2011.

The list, which Greek financial minister Evangelos Venizelos dubbed the “list of shame“, included Greek business leaders, artists, and athletes. It is conventional wisdom that Greek tax evaders are using tax havens in Switzerland, but also in Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, and Monaco.

Similar data is available in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere in Europe.

Forced by the sovereign debt crisis to improve their own tax efficiency, European governments and the European Union have created new debates on tax evasion.

In late March, a workshop entitled “Tax and financial havens – a threat to the EU’s internal market”, took place in the Belgian capital Brussels.

The event was organised by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), an official advisory body to the EU. In his opening speech, the president of the EESC section on internal markets, Bryan Cassidy, plainly singled out Switzerland, Luxembourg and Britain as notorious onshore fiscal havens within Europe.

Cassidy also stressed that “money laundering and tax havens are closely connected.”

The legal conflicts with Switzerland on tax evasion also highlight the futility of the decades-long international fight against tax evasion, mostly within the framework of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its associated Financial Action Task Force (FATF).

Peillon told IPS that despite the financial crisis of 2007, “tax havens in Europe are doing as (well) as ever, even if the so-called black and grey lists of the OECD and the FATF pretend otherwise.”

According to the OECD and the FATF, as of Feb. 2012, only two countries worldwide do not fulfil the “strategic measures against money laundering and finance for terrorism standards” (AML/CFT) established by both groups: Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Additionally, the FATF-OECD list 15 other “jurisdictions with strategic AML/CFT deficiencies that have not made sufficient progress in addressing the deficiencies or have not committed to an action plan developed with the FATF to address the deficiencies.”

These 15 jurisdictions are countries and territories in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, but do not include a single one of the most notorious tax havens in the Caribbean, such as the Cayman Islands, or in OECD states in North America, such the U.S. state of Delaware, or Europe.