Sky News Gets Double G20 Finance Exclusives

Sky News has spoken to both the US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and the IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the G20 summit of world finance leaders at St Andrews in Scotland.  Geithner made the headlines by saying that he is "not prepared" to support Gordon Brown's plan for a financial transaction levy.

In an interview with Sky’s Jeff Randall this afternoon, Geithner dealt what could be a fatal blow to the Prime Minister’s plans for G20 leaders to consider a tax on financial transactions to protect taxpayers and make banks more accountable. The money collected could be held in a global fund to bail out failed banks, Mr Brown suggested, but would only work if adopted globally.

Mr Geithner rejected the proposal when asked by Jeff Randall if he supported the proposal. He said: “That’s not something that we’re prepared to support, but again I think we all share a basic interest in trying to make sure we build a system where taxpayers aren’t exposed in the future and where the financial institutions are bearing the consequences of their mistakes, that they’re responsible for the risks they take.”

The International Monetary Fund head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has said that he doesn’t think a transaction tax such as the one proposed by Gordon Brown earlier today at the G20 summit in St Andrews is likely to work.

Speaking shortly after the US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had exclusively told Jeff Randall that he could ‘not support’ the Prime Minster’s proposal, Strauss-Kahn said: “The head of state meeting in Pittsburgh in September asked the IMF to work on this question of a tax of the financial sector – could be a transaction tax or not. I don’t believe it will be a transaction tax because transactions are very difficult to measure and so it’s very easy to avoid a transaction tax.”

Jeff Randall: “Would we damage Wall Street and The City?”

DSK: ”We don’t want to damage anybody. We want to have a financial sector which will not put the global economy at risk as was the case in this financial crisis.”