No one has yet offered a definition of ‘tax haven’ on which we can all agree. The IMF, the OECD and the other main agencies tend to adopt the language they think acceptable to their own constituency. The term ‘tax haven’ is too obviously value laden, as the French equivalent, paradis fiscal, makes clear. ‘Offshore’, too, conjures images of island paradises, when some of the locations involved – Liechtenstein, for example – are landlocked. ‘International financial centre’, a creation of the financial services industry, seems designed solely to give an air of respectability.