James S. Henry, Esq. is leading investigative economist, attorney, teacher, and activist with a strong focus on front-line global justice issues like kleptocracy, tax havens, and the climate crisis. In the private sector, Mr. Henry has served as Director of Economic Research (chief economist), McKinsey & Co.; VP Strategy, IBM/Lotus Development; Business Development Manager, Chairman's Office (Jack Welch), GE; and Senior Consultant, Monitor Company. He is founder of Sag Harbor Group, a strategy consulting firm that has served such leading clients as ABB, Bell Labs, Charles Allen & Co., the Calvert Fund, Cemex, ChinaTrust, the Joint Caribbean Task Force (Scotland Yard/FBI), IBM/Lotus, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Swedish Power Board, TransAlta, Volvo, and Daikin.
In the pro bono world Mr. Henry is a Global Justice Fellow and a Lecturer on the Yale faculty, where for 6 years he has co-authored a weekly seminar for Yale graduate students and upper-year undergraduates on "Global Justice Problems" – urgent interrelated matters like the global warming, tax dodging, kleptocracy, the future of democracy, the global art industry, and “dangerous technologies” (AI, fintech, nuclear power) that cut across national boundaries. He has also served as a Senior Fellow at Columbia University's Center for Sustainable Investment, where he has led seminars on international tax policy, the global haven industry, the remittance cartel, and "fintech" for the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA).
Mr. Henry has been active “change maker.” He has helped to start and foster many activist NGOs. In 2003-4 he was one of the founding principals of TJN USA and the Tax Justice Network, a global NGO that led the fight against financial secrecy jurisdictions (“tax havens”), offshore tax avoidance by major corporations and wealthy individuals, and kleptocracy. He served as a TJN Senior Advisor (2005-2022), a global board member of TJN (2005-13) and TJN US (2005-present), and a liaison to the US tax reform organization Americans for Tax Fairness. From 2009 to 2015 he served as a board member of Long Island University. Since the 1990s he has also been a pro bono environmental lawyer and a ACLU/ NYCLU cooperating attorney in New York's EDNY, serving on NYCLU's Suffolk County board. In 2020-21, he served as a Board Member of Amnesty International USA, on its Finance and Strategy Committees. In 2021-23 he was a co-founder of The Institute for Access to Public Information (https://foia-foil.com), a NYS 501c3 devoted to litigating FOIA cases. In 2024 he is serving as Chairman and a co-founder of UAML.org, a global coalition dedicated to fighting money laundering.
In 2020-21, in the wake of New York's pandemic-induced fiscal crisis, Mr. Henry helped to organize a campaign to have New York State stop rebating $15 billion per year of badly-needed state tax revenues that NYS collects from its .1% stock transfer tax on Wall Street investors — most of whom are not NYS residents. This very practical progressive sales tax secured majority support in the NYS Senate and Assembly, but to date (2024) it has been unable to overcome the “capture” of the hierarchies of both major parties in NYS by Wall Street. This organizing effort did encourage the revival of a global campaign for a "financial transactions tax” (“FTT”) in the US, the EU, and Asia. From 2014 to the present he has been a key leader of the QPAM Coalition, a group of experts from six countries that has encouraged the US DOL to enforce its laws against criminal banks that advise US pensions funds. In 2024, for this year’s G20 in Brazil, Mr. Henry assembled an international coalition of experts on global warming, reforestation, and soil conservation to propose a “Global Reforestation Fund,” financed by a .1% global FTT, to promote soil conservation and cool the planet directly.
As an investigative economist with a global perspective, Mr. Henry is a leading practitioner of the “to the frontlines” school of reporting. He has written numerous pioneering investigative articles and books about international private banking, offshore havens, debt, capital flight, development, leading kleptocrats, and climate finance. Since the 1970s, he has conducted first-hand investigations of corruption, corporate chicanery, tax dodging, and debt in dozens of developing countries and havens, including the Philippines, South Africa, Angola, Kenya, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, the Bahamas, Barbados, Switzerland, Delaware, and the Cayman Islands. In the 1980s he authored the American Bar Association's first full-length analysis of US tax compliance. His award-winning books (Banqueros y Llavadolares. (Tercer Mundo, 1996) and The Blood Bankers. (Basic Books, 2003, 2005, 2014)) provided the first detailed investigations of the global underground economy and the rise of the global haven industry. He was the principle author of The Price of Offshore Revisited (July 2012/2013,2016, TJN), a seminal work on unrecorded offshore private wealth whose estimates have recently (June 2020) been validated by the OECD. His original reporting has appeared in many leading publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Business Week, the Nation, the New Republic, the Atlantic, The Financial Times, the Economist, Jornal do Brasil, the Philippines Inquirer, La Nacion, El Pais, The American Interest (Contributing Editor) and DCReport.Org (Senior Investigative Editor). In 2010 he was named the Edward R. Murrow Fellow in Investigative Journalism at The Fletcher School of Diplomacy. In 2016 he was a leading commentator and analyst on the ICIJ’s Panama Papers, and served as an member of the Iceland Special Commission that investigated the role of illicit offshore assets in Iceland’s 2007-2009 economic collapse. In 2019 he was named a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale University. In June 2021 he received one of two TJN/AABA (UK) Annual Awards for Contributions to Tax Justice. In 2017-24 he has been a key advisor on several OCCRP investigations of kleptocracy, including its 2022 “Suisse-gate” investigation.
Mr. Henry has testified as an invited expert numerous times before the US Congress, the UN, the EU Parliament, and the FBI’s International Corruption Unit on global tax havens, the underground economy, and tax justice. He has also presented many TED talks, and has been a featured commentator on leading media outlets, including the BBC, NPR, CBC, Australia ABC, Zembla, ZDF, most US TV networks (ABC,NBC,CBS,CNN,CNBC, and MSNBC), and Al Jazeera. He also played a leading on-air role in several feature-length documentary films, including "The Giant Beast That Is the Global Economy,'" (Amazon Prime, April 2019); "The Finance Curse," (Nick Shaxson, et al, 2024); "The Price We Pay" (Harold Crooks, TIFF, 2014), and "We're Not Broke" (Charles Davidson, Sundance, 2013).
Born and raised in Minnesota, Mr. Henry is an honors graduate of Winona Public High School, Harvard College (Magna Cum Laude, Social Studies ’72; Detur Prize; Phi Beta Kappa, National Merit Scholar, Chairman, Student Advisory Committee, Kennedy Institute of Politics); Harvard Law School (JD.,Honors,1976); the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (MS, ABD, Economics, 1978);a Danforth Fellow; one of the original “Nader Raiders,” a member of the New York Bar since 1979, and an Adirondacks '46R. He and his family are based in New York.