“[John Christensen] described the offshore phenomenon from an economist’s perspective for the first time. This wasn’t an exotic sideshow to the world economy: it was right at the heart of the globalisation project: its dark heart.”
~ Author Nicholas Shaxson describing his first “stunning” meeting with John Christensen
John Christensen is a man of many hats: economist, forensic auditor, system analyst, documentary filmmaker, publisher, political activist—and exposer of the offshore network of tax havens.
As a native of the island of Jersey—and Jersey’s economic advisor from 1987 to 1998—Christensen was uniquely qualified to dig into what he and ally Nicholas Shaxson came to call the “spider’s web”: Britain’s offshore network of three Crown Dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man) and 14 Overseas Territories (including Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands). Believing that “the only way to understand how the system functioned was to work inside it,” Christensen had worked up to his economic advisor role by first putting in a two-year stint at the Deloitte accounting firm (at that time, Touche Ross & Co) on Jersey.
After some work both undercover and as a whistleblower, Christensen founded the Tax Justice Network (TJN) in 2003 as a more formal mechanism to increase transparency and accountability in the global tax system. As Shaxson has explained, before Christensen set himself to that heroic task, “There was almost no understanding of the offshore world.” Pre-Christensen and TJN, Shaxon adds, the offshore systems were “a racy and exciting place of James Bond films, usually located in small islands peopled by mafiosi, a few celebrity tax-dodgers, assassins, tax dodging millionaires, rock stars, drug mules, racing drivers and spies. That was…about as far as anyone’s understanding went.”
By 2016, when Christensen stepped down as TJN’s executive director (remaining as board chair until 2021), his successor, Alex Cobham, was describing Christensen’s and TJN’s achievements as “nothing short of extraordinary,” crediting their use of “high quality research and excellent communications” as having changed the “political weather” on the issues of financial secrecy (and the tax havens’ pivotal role therein), tax evasion and tax avoidance, and related human rights damage. The next year, Christensen and colleagues released their groundbreaking documentary, The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire (which is, for the fourth time, our recommended Movie of the Week).
Cobham’s conclusion in 2016—that “there is still weather to change”—is a sentiment that Christensen and Shaxson continue to share. In 2021, they helped found the UK-based Balanced Economy Project, with the goal of “hold[ing] powerful corporations to account, and reclaim[ing] the ability of present and future generations to continually restructure our economies by collectively constraining corporate power.”
As Christensen’s many other affiliations attest, he is clearly not one to rest on his laurels. We congratulate him as well as Shaxson for their decades of persistent efforts on behalf of transparency—efforts that have made a meaningful difference not just by exposing problems but by putting forth high-integrity solutions now adopted in many settings.
Related:
John Christensen Steps Down as Tax Justice Network Chair
Nick Shaxson: Leaving the Tax Justice Network
Related at the Solari Report:
Movie of the Week: March 17, 2025: The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire
Book Review: Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson
Book Review: The Finance Curse by Nicholas Shaxson
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