Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens
by Nicholas Shaxson · 11 Apr 2011 · 429pp · 120,332 words
corruption that has become so naturalized in the western world.” —Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting, University of Essex, UK TREASURE ISLANDS Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens NICHOLAS SHAXSON TREASURE ISLANDS Copyright © Nicholas Shaxson, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States–a division
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-10501-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Shaxson, Nicholas. Treasure islands : uncovering the damage of offshore banking and tax havens / Nicholas Shaxson. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-230-10501-0 1. Tax evasion—United States. 2. Tax havens. 3. Banks and banking, Foreign. I. Title. HV6344.U6S53 2011 364.1’338—dc22 2010035424
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part of, and a metaphor for, the offshore world. To understand this, it is necessary to explain some fundamental truths about what a tax haven or offshore jurisdiction is. Tax havens provide escape routes from rules and laws elsewhere. These two words, “escape” and “elsewhere,” will crop up repeatedly in this book. The zero
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, literally, available for sale or rent in such places. The biggest tax haven in the U.S. zone of influence is Panama. It began registering foreign ships from 1919 to help Standard Oil escape U.S. taxes and regulations, and offshore finance followed: Wall Street interests helped Panama introduce lax company incorporation laws in
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before entering the mainstream global financial system in London and elsewhere. A large amount of foreign investment into China goes via the British Virgin Islands. Offshore financial structures typically involve a trick sometimes known as laddering—a practice also expressed by the French word saucissonage, meaning to slice something into pieces like
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are the supreme generators of remoteness and artificiality: creating secrecy barriers and generating unfathomable complexity as corporations garland their financial affairs around the world’s tax havens to fox the world’s tax authorities and regulators, and to shield particular investors against other nations’ laws and regulations. As we have discovered
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, the UK received19 net bank financing of $332.5 billion just from its tax havens of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man; in June 2009 the British web as a whole held an estimated $3.2 trillion in offshore bank deposits, half the global total, according to data from the Bank for International
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like securitization, insurance, mergers and acquisitions, and asset management, but much of its business is domestic, making London easily the world’s biggest international—and offshore—financial hub. The head of the Corporation of London is the Lord Mayor of London—not to be confused with the mayor of London, who runs
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forays offshore, to Switzerland in Goldfinger in 1964 and to Nassau in Thunderball in 1965, injected an appealingly subversive frisson into the image of tax havens and uncontrolled offshore finance, the new global hothouse for international crime. By 1967 Robert Roosa, the energetic U.S. undersecretary for the Treasury, warned that the Euromarkets had
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he died in 1983. He once boasted that the Mob activities he was associated with were “bigger than U.S. Steel.” Lansky began with Swiss offshore banking in 1932,1 perfecting the loan-back technique. This involved first moving money out of the United States—in suitcases stuffed with cash, diamonds, airline
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, become permanent reserves of bank capital. Not only that, but depositors willingly accept below-market interest rates in exchange for secrecy—boosting the profits to offshore banking. By 1970 Cornfeld’s IOS was tottering under ever more scandals. Some of IOS’s Swiss employees had started complaining that Cornfeld owed them money
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in the Caribbean and Panama serviced the Latin American drug trade; its divisions in the United Arab Emirates, then amid an oil boom and an offshore banking bonanza, serviced the heroin trades in Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan; and it used Hong Kong to cater to drug traffickers in Laos, Thailand, and Burma
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a clear defense of tax haven London.13 Ever since then, Morgenthau has struggled to wake people up to offshore crimes, personally pressing four U.S. treasury secretaries to pay more attention, with little result. “I remember giving a speech a couple of years ago to talk about offshore banks. It put everyone to
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…. It leaves out all the blood and guts of what really happened.” Henry’s 2003 book Blood Bankers explores a number of shocking episodes where offshore banking led to crisis after crisis in low-income countries. First, bankers lent these countries far more than they could productively absorb; then they taught local
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completely missing from the Central Bank’s books. It turned out that most of these loans had been disbursed to account numbers assigned to Philippine offshore banking units or other private companies. Apparently, the Central Bank gave MHT the account numbers, and we never questioned whether they were Central Bank accounts—we
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his closest associates. Walter Wriston, the chief executive of Citibank from 1967 to 1984, described the thinking of many of the parties involved as private offshore banking emerged as a global force. Sitting before a picture of himself with President Marcos and his wife, Imelda (the picture, he said, “caused so much
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said. “It was local oligarchies with offshore accounts. The dollar debt of Argentina in the early 1990s was owed mainly to Argentineans operating out of offshore banking centers. The major beneficiaries of foreign debt service were their own flight-capitalists, not bondholders in North America and Europe.” This kind of simple trick
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when offshore erosion has been considered, it has been taken as an inconvenience, to be addressed with Band-Aids. As one IMF report put it: “Offshore banking has most certainly been a factor in the Asian financial crisis. A special effort is therefore needed to help emerging economies . . . to avert financial crises
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FOR ECONOMIC Co-operation and Development, a club of rich countries that includes the world’s most important secrecy jurisdictions, made an astonishing admission: Tax havens cause great harm. Tax havens and associated offshore activities, an OECD report acknowledged, “erode the tax bases of other countries, distort trade and investment patterns and undermine the
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- researched book about the episode. “The OECD,” he wrote, “had to give up its ambition to regulate international tax competition.”30 The tax havens had won. A lot of the tax havens’ arguments hinge on the rightful scope of state power. Democracies have long supported the principle of progressive taxation, as outlined by the
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of sustaining an establishment consensus and suppressing troublemakers makes islands especially hospitable to offshore finance, reassuring international finance that they can be trusted not to allow democratic politics to interfere in the business of making money. In the British tax haven of Jersey, three local sayings encapsulate the constant social pressure: “Don’t hang
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discussing the interbank market, where banks lend to each other. “A large part of the growth in OTC trading of derivative instruments may have involved offshore banks,” the IMF said.37 “The interbank nature of the offshore market implies that, in the event of financial distress, contagion is likely
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all the noise from G20 leaders about tax havens in 2008 and 2009, the IMF concluded, this dangerous offshore aspect went entirely unnoticed. The core principles the IMF outlined are simple. A corporation borrows money from offshore, then pays interest on that loan back to the offshore financing company. It then uses the old
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Affairs) 55, nos. 8–9 (1999). The share has grown substantially since then, because offshore financial services have been growing at substantially faster rates than the growth in trade. 2.See Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux, Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 51. This work
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measures of offshore, in various tables in the book, show explosive recent growth (interrupted by the financial crisis). Also see Luca Errico and Alberto Musalem, “Offshore Banking: An Analysis of Micro- and Macro-Prudential Issues,” IMF, January 1999, pp. 17–19. This study cites a figure of 54 percent in 1999, which
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, according to the IMF, because “the distinction between onshore and offshore banking has become progressively blurred.” 3.Data from Palan et al., Tax Havens; from “IMF Finds ‘Trillions’ in Undeclared Wealth,” Wealth Bulletin, March 15, 2010; and from M. K. Lewis, “International Banking and Offshore Finance: London and the Major Centres,” in Mark P. Hampton and
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Jason P. Abbott, eds., Offshore Finance Centres and Tax Havens: The Rise of Global Capital (London: Macmillan Business, 1999). 4.The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO
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) reported in 2008 that 83 of the nation’s hundred biggest corporations had subsidiaries in tax havens; the following year the Tax Justice Network, an
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23, 2007; “Offshore Explorations: Isle of Man,” Tax Notes, November 5, 2007; “Offshore Explorations: Guernsey,” Tax Notes, October 10, 2007. These are considered conservative estimates: Offshore bank deposits in Jersey alone were worth $800 billion in mid-2009; Colin Powell, chairman of the Jersey Financial Services Commission, estimated in 2009 that trusts
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. 1108. 20.Sol Picciotto also describes this in his “Offshore: The State as Legal Fiction,” in Mark P. Hampton and Jason P. Abbott, eds., Offshore Finance Centres and Tax Havens: The Rise of Global Capital (New York: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 43–79. 21.Obituary: Edmund Hoyle Vestey, 1932–2007, Blue Star Line, http://www
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.S. Senate Committee, June 3, 2008, http://commerce.senate.gov/public/_files/IMGJune3Testimony0.pdf. 19.Michael Foot, “Final Report of the Independent Review of British Offshore Financial Centres,” HM Treasury (UK), October 2009. 20.“Reaction to the Tax Gap Series,” The Guardian, February 14, 2009. 21.Prem Sikka, “UK Company Law Is
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. 63.Bass, “The Future of Money.” 64.Kynaston, The City of London Volume IV, p. 396; and Mark P. Hampton and Jason P. Abbott, Offshore Finance Centres and Tax Havens (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 91. 65.Letter from HB Mynors of the Bank of England to Sir Charles J. Hambro of Hambro Bank, January
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, one of Benn’s constituents, “Ref. Tax Havens and the Bank of England,” May 30, 1975. The letter was forwarded to the UK Chancellor, Dennis Healey. 26.Author’s interview with Scriven, March 2009. 27.Michael Foot, “Final Report of the Independent Review of British Offshore Financial Centres,” HM Treasury, October 2009, http://www
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author’s interview with Hudson and “An Interview with Michael Hudson: An Insider Spills the Beans on Offshore Banking Centers,” Counterpunch, March 25, 2004, http://www.counterpunch.org/schaefer03252004.html. 34.Luca Errico and Alberto Musalem, “Offshore Banking: An Analysis of Micro- and Macro-Prudential Issues,” IMF, January 1999. 35.Todd Moss, Gunilla Pettersson
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Mackerel, Accounting Firms and the State in Globalization,” Essex Business School Working Paper No. WP 09/05, February 2009. 37.Luca Errico and Alberto Musalem, “Offshore Banking: An Analysis of Micro- and Macro-Prudential Issues,” IMF, January 1999. Also: “Favourable regulatory treatment in OFCs increases the operational leeway of
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, 153 Offshore Magic Circle, 25, 201–2 offshore system banana example, 13–14, 42, 108 and capital, 98 centers of, 16–23 See British tax havens; European tax havens; U.S. tax havens and criminality: See criminal money defined, 6–8, 11–12 and deflection, 166–7 as ecosystem, 25 as “efficient”: See “efficiency” employment in
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, 169–70 and silence, 30, 170, 171–80 and slavery, 140 statistics on, 11, 26, 28–9, 32 and tax havens: See tax havens and taxation, 144–8 as unpatriotic, 39–43 See multinational corporations; tax havens oil, 1–4, 7–9, 17, 19–20, 22–3, 36, 39, 60, 68–9, 82, 105, 107–8
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, 110, 118–19, 129, 133, 157–8, 160, 163, 167, 185, 230, 246n4 tax havens/secrecy jurisdictions “blacklist” of, 24–5, 150, 161–2, 168–9, 223 British: See British tax havens central, 16–23, 26 See British tax havens; European tax havens; U.S. tax havens and colonialism: See colonialism companies using, 20–2 defined, 6–8, 11–13
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, 194, 217 and financial regulation, 63, 67–70, 78–80, 100–3, 119–20 statistics on oil, 1, 32, 40, 52, 60, 162–3 tax havens: See U.S. tax havens and transfer pricing, 14–15 USAID, 22 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 18, 109, 112, 133, 142 U.S. Congress, 20, 39
The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven for Fat Cats and Big Business
by Richard Brooks · 2 Jan 2014 · 301pp · 88,082 words
‘tax scroungers’ face no meaningful deterrent in the way that benefit fraudsters do; prosecutions for the thousands of rich individuals secretly stashing millions in offshore tax havens, for example, are forsaken in favour of generous ‘amnesties’ and inter-governmental agreements that effectively decriminalize the richest form of tax evasion. Mind the gap
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prevailing income tax rates. But again, none would be avoiding tax. The coalition government swiftly followed up with tax exemptions for companies’ tax haven branches and for profits parked in tax haven subsidiary companies in the most contrived manner. At the same time, the Treasury persists with allowing tax breaks for the costs of
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benefits: it’s no coincidence that widely mis-sold ‘payment protection’ insurance policies on loans and dubious ‘extended warranties’ on electrical products were run from tax havens by the likes of Barclays and Dixons. It creates risks for companies’ shareholders, employees and society at large, as amply demonstrated by the tax-incentivized
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was ‘tax arbitrage linked to tax treatment of debt’; then there was ‘deduction for interest expense (not equity)’; ‘exemption/deferral of tax on foreign profits’; ‘tax haven affiliates (conduits)’; ‘hybrid instruments’ and ‘tax bias encouraging growth of bank profits (over asset protection/management)’ caused by ‘favourable capital gains tax treatment of stock
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hands of the recipients. So corporate tax avoidance subverts the entire principle of ensuring that capital, as well as labour, pays a share of taxation. Tax haven Britain The current government nonetheless insists that ‘the consensus, among economists at least, is that it’s predominantly the employee who foots the bill’, and
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laws tackled the practice of underpricing sales to, or overpricing imports from, overseas affiliates. This so-called ‘transfer pricing’ abuse, which often involved inserting a tax haven company in the middle of legitimate transactions, could seriously reduce or eliminate tax bills. A British company importing £1000 worth of widgets, for example, might
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Crown Dependencies of the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man were building on centuries of harbouring financial and political fugitives by similarly expanding their offshore financial services through banks and trust companies. Before long most of these eighteen territories would become mere shop fronts for tax dodging, tailoring their laws at
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limiting offshore movements of funds, exchange controls had prevented companies simply moving large amounts of capital into the world’s tax havens where it could turn a quick tax-free buck. With large offshore financial flows restricted to payments for goods, services and genuine investment, cross-border tax avoidance had been restricted to ‘transfer
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taxes, the company needed to ensure it was not ‘managed and controlled’ – a trigger for tax residence – in either place. Its directors toured Europe’s tax havens, holding thirty board meetings in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg, Geneva, Monaco and elsewhere to ensure the peripatetic company remained stateless for tax purposes. A new
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chancellor, Nigel Lawson, belatedly agreed to plug the growing hole in his bucket. In came ‘controlled foreign companies’ laws stipulating that corporate profits diverted to tax haven subsidiaries would still be taxed in the UK. But with a raft of exemptions and let-outs, the voluminous laws were full of loopholes requiring
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secure permanently lower tax bills. For conglomerates outside the City, unencumbered by such restrictions, the international tax game offered even richer alternatives. 4 Foreign Adventures Tax havens at the heart of Europe enable Britain’s corporate elite to slash billions off their tax bills Nestled awkwardly where France, Belgium and Germany’s
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The Grand Duchy was now the bolt-hole of choice for a far richer cross-border tax-dodger: the acquisitive multinational company. Employing the standard tax haven ploy of adapting its law to suit companies looking to avoid another country’s tax, Luxembourg boasts special rules for intermediate ‘holding companies’ through which
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considered to be among the best in the world at blocking the abuse? Shut out The ‘controlled foreign companies’ (CFC) laws, under which British multinationals’ tax haven subsidiaries could generally be taxed in the UK even though they were not resident in the country nor performing any business here, served a crucial
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the US. And critically, the company would claim nothing would be picked up by the British anti-tax avoidance laws aimed at profits diverted into tax havens by multinationals like Pearson. Figure 8 • Pearson US earns a tax break Yet the artificiality of the arrangement became apparent when Perrin and I
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returned ‘approved’ by the Luxembourg taxman. Figure 9 • The business service centre hosting Pearson’s Luxembourg companies and branches Euro slash Luxembourg has become a tax haven of its own government’s and the tax avoidance industry’s creation, and a pretty underhand one at that. It proclaims a standard corporate tax
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. For British multinationals there remained a major hurdle to overcome. The same 1984 ‘controlled foreign companies’ laws that tackled British multinationals diverting financing income into tax haven subsidiaries applied equally to the parking of intangible assets in such offshore companies. In the same way that they couldn’t stuff these companies with
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names and big wholesale turnovers. They could get round the ‘controlled foreign companies’ laws that stopped cruder techniques such as simply parking valuable assets in tax haven subsidiaries. Instead, they moved entire businesses into them, minus the industrial bit, but still with enough of the economic substance required to escape the anti
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at the cutting edge of twenty-first century capitalism discovered the joys of fragmenting their businesses and parking the profitable parts in the world’s tax havens. And an indulgent government was not going to make any of them pay tax at reasonable levels. Rules governing multinationals’ offshore subsidiaries would be
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who, as shadow chancellor a few years later would promise: ‘A Labour Chancellor will not permit tax reliefs to millionaires in tax havens.’41 Filthy rich Tax relief for millionaires using tax havens was, however, exactly what Gordon Brown permitted and extended over thirteen years at nos 10 and 11 Downing Street. His imperviousness
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Second, they didn’t like the way the ‘controlled foreign companies’ laws brought in by Nigel Lawson in 1984 taxed profits diverted by multinationals into tax haven companies even if, they complained, those profits were made outside Britain. These were in fact far from draconian laws. They only ever required a multinational
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international tax rules had been knocked down. Profits repatriated from overseas operations as dividends were exempted from tax, creating an incentive to divert income into tax havens in the knowledge they could be brought back and returned to grateful shareholders without further tax charge. Meanwhile those 1984 laws designed to stop companies
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shifting profits into tax havens in the first place would, it was promised, be rewritten under a ‘liaison committee’ made up of the big beneficiaries of any relaxations including
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multinationals hamper the competiveness of smaller ones that can’t cut their tax bills with an offshore finance company or by shifting their brand names into a tax haven. What’s more, tax concessions for diverting profits into tax havens will take jobs out of the country. In simple terms, if a company can easily send
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UK holding company in order to reduce its worldwide tax rate from 27% to around 21%,56 it was apparent that Britain as a corporate tax haven was perversely shaping global capitalism. By 2012, the richest multinational corporations had put themselves beyond what was officially considered tax avoidance. Writing their own
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peace offers, meanwhile, were sleeping far more easily. TIEAs of a clown Tax dodging is certainly not the limit of the economic delinquency facilitated by tax havens. ‘Offshore financial centres’, as they prefer to be known, also provide the regulatory conditions that enable financiers to do things that they would find either impossible or
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regulatory settlement for the bank – was set up in the Cayman Islands. Serious reform of the malformed financial system therefore had to take in the tax havens that were pumping toxic financial products through its banking arteries. As British prime minister Gordon Brown rhetorically asked a special gathering of the US Congress
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of tax havenry. Invigorated by the post-9/11 impetus to frustrate terrorist financing, this work had focused on picking away at the secrecy of tax havens through a programme of ‘tax information exchange agreements’ (TIEAs) under which the havens would divulge details of money stashed in their territories. But the
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secrecy in international financial services is intensifying’.22 Data from the Bank of International Settlements showed that two years after the financial crisis, deposits in tax haven accounts had remained stubbornly consistent at $2.7 trillion. The academics who crunched the numbers concluded categorically that ‘the era of bank secrecy is not
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territories, spurred on by action taken in the US to force offshore banks to hand over details of US citizens’ income under its Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. But none of this addresses the fundamental flaw in the process: that tax havens have neither the will or the laws or the capability to gather
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the information in the first place. And while the information exchange negotiations continue front stage, behind the scenes, the bankers, lawyers and accountants that serve tax havens regroup. They continue tax-evading, regulation-sidestepping businesses but now with international endorsement. The tax information exchange pantomime has scuppered the best chance there was
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chain management’ strips out a further layer of local autonomy, entrepreneurship and innovation. ‘Aggregation of entrepreneurial risks at a hub entity’ – located in a faraway tax haven – is exactly what Ernst & Young recommends. The same accountants conscientiously advise companies to ensure that their ‘transfer pricing’ arrangements faithfully follow real business operations so
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behave. As source state withholding taxes fall, it becomes ever more lucrative to send interest, royalties, and management and technical fees to the north’s tax havens. Which means locating capital, brands, know-how, expertise and management there. When in 2010 accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers pitched their plans to another brewer, Heineken, for
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the same thing. Haven sent This trend would be serious enough without the encouragement of the British government. But the changes to laws governing the tax haven subsidiary companies of British multinationals, outlined in chapter 7, will make the avoidance of tax in developing countries far easier. The previous ‘controlled foreign companies
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’ laws, if properly policed, imposed a UK tax charge on profits diverted into tax havens from third countries like Ghana, and demand that the haven operations have real substance. But the changes ushered in over 2011 and 2012, taking effect
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largely in 2013, create enormous opportunities. Straightforward schemes will include the tax haven finance subsidiary that will strip out profits in the form of interest payments from operations subject to normal tax rates, such as those in developing
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were impenetrable. Accounts for multinationals’ local subsidiary companies are either entirely inaccessible or available only for local inspection. And of course all figures for their tax haven companies are strictly for insiders’ eyes only. Greater transparency is possible. A worldwide ‘Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’ reveals payments that companies make for mining developing
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as a countervailing influence on multinationals’ tax planning. On the one hand, the biggest companies would still have strong financial incentives to divert profits into tax havens but, on the other, they would fear the consequences of doing so. A more reasonable allocation of taxable profits and the more economically valuable functions
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operations within them to a minimum. There was even the crucial suggestion that countries’ ‘controlled foreign companies’ (CFC) laws, which sweep up profits diverted into tax havens, should be strengthened. This, however, was precisely the opposite of what the British government was doing by effectively trashing its own CFC laws (as OECD
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taxpayers) and exploiting taxpayer-funded infrastructure, should be expected to show how they are fulfilling it. With no sign that opportunities to divert profits into tax havens will end (quite the reverse), the attraction of doing so would at least be tempered by the knowledge that investors, campaigners, the media and the
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tax bills. In particular, tax authorities should be able to override internal reorganizations effected for tax purposes, such as moving capital and assets into special tax haven subsidiary companies. These practices become especially pernicious when members of the international club, privileged by taxation agreements and free trade treaties, behave exactly as such
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not. As the volume of tax avoidance routed through Luxembourg, Ireland and the Netherlands (and soon the UK) proves, the European Union now embraces some tax havens whose club membership makes them far more toxic than the traditional tropical island variety. Existing moves against the abuse of the freedoms afforded by club
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UK. Internationally, when the limited effect of exchange of information becomes obvious in the not too distant future, tough economic sanctions must be agreed against tax havens. To compensate for the losses to these territories’ economies, their ‘mother’ countries will have to provide economic assistance but it will prove far cheaper
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exempts British multinationals’ foreign profits but allows tax relief for the costs of funding them. In doing so it has turned Britain into a corporate tax haven, inviting multinationals to shelter income offshore and encouraging them to place real business overseas. These developments need to be reversed at the first opportunity in
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Premières Lignes, broadcast May 2012. 26 Survey can be found on ActionAid’s Tax Justice Campaign website; http://www.actionaid.org.uk/103031/ftse_100_tax_haven_tracker.html 27 ‘Why Luxembourg? A Unique Location to Expand your Business’, by PwC and the American Chamber of Commerce in Luxembourg; http://www.setupineurope
The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens
by Gabriel Zucman, Teresa Lavender Fagan and Thomas Piketty · 21 Sep 2015 · 121pp · 34,193 words
Idées, 2013 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zucman, Gabriel, author. [Richesse cachée des nations. English] The hidden wealth of nations: the scourge of tax havens / Gabriel Zucman; translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan; with a foreword by Thomas Piketty. pages; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-24542
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2015019946 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). Contents FOREWORD by Thomas Piketty INTRODUCTION Acting against Tax Havens ONE A Century of Offshore Finance TWO The Missing Wealth of Nations THREE Mistakes FOUR What to Do?: A New Approach FIVE The Tax Avoidance of Multinational Corporations CONCLUSION
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%. In Russia and the oil-rich countries of the Middle East (probably the most unequal and explosive region of the entire world), the share of offshore financial wealth appears to be above 50%. In the United States, the share of offshore wealth certainly seems to be much less than in Africa or
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The Hidden Wealth of Nations is that we now understand this problem more clearly, and we know that it can be solved. INTRODUCTION Acting against Tax Havens Tax havens are at the heart of financial, budgetary, and democratic crises. Let’s take a look: In the course of the last five years alone
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of free exchange justifies this theft. What Is to Be Done? For some, the battle against tax havens has been viewed as lost from the start. From London to Delaware, from Hong Kong to Zurich, offshore banking centers are essential cogs in the financial machine of capitalism, used by the rich and powerful throughout
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opacity that allows them to prosper. The second dimension of the plan of action I propose is to levy sanctions proportional to the costs that tax havens impose on other countries. Calls for transparency, new laws, or more bureaucrats are insufficient. Only combined international pressure can truly have an effect, by
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shifting the incentives of tax havens. One type of possible sanction is trade tariffs. The calculations presented in this book show that France, Germany, and Italy would be able to force
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sell the most but often pay little in taxes. The Symbolic Power of Finance If we believe most of the commentators, the financial arrangements among tax havens rival one another in their complexity. In the face of such virtuosity, citizens are helpless, nation-states are powerless, even the experts are overpowered.
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past ten years, and we may rightfully hope for important advances in the near future. The fact remains that most of the progress in understanding tax havens achieved up to now—remarkable progress in many respects—can be credited not to economists, but to a certain number of pioneering nongovernmental organizations, journalists
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in the United States, Germany, or France; Swiss banks only play the role of intermediary. This is why it is absurd to think that Swiss offshore banking owes its success to the strength of the Swiss franc, to the traditionally low inflation rate prevailing in Switzerland, or to political stability, as its
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new vantage point appears from which to follow the development of offshore finance: US Treasury surveys of the holdings of US financial securities by non-American residents. Even today these statistics are still an essential instrument for measuring the weight of tax havens on the world economy. The first modern survey took place in
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the liberalization of British financial markets in 1986. New centers of wealth management emerged: Hong Kong, Singapore, Jersey, Luxembourg, and the Bahamas. In all these tax havens, private bankers do the same things as in Geneva: they hold stock and bond portfolios for their foreign customers, collect dividends and interest, provide investment
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where associates are responsible for their own wealth, have branches in Nassau and Singapore. The Virgin Islands—Switzerland—Luxembourg Rather than competing with one another, tax havens have in fact had a tendency to specialize in the various stages of wealth management. In the past, Swiss bankers provided all services: carrying out
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the most promising. But the funds are not located in Switzerland. Most of those in which rich people invest today are domiciled in three other tax havens: Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Cayman Islands. The classic type of funds, sometimes known as UCITS (Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities), has been
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funds have migrated to the Grand Duchy, and from their accounts in Geneva, investors now essentially buy Luxembourg funds. Switzerland has also left to other tax havens control over the techniques used to hide beneficiaries. Today numbered accounts are forbidden by anti-money-laundering legislation. They have been replaced by trusts, foundations
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and opacity are far from dead. Granted, recent policy changes, as we shall see, are making it more difficult for moderately wealthy individuals to use offshore banks to dodge taxes: for them, the era of banking secrecy is coming to an end. Switzerland has agreed to cooperate with the United States to
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very incomplete. And since a well-documented estimate is an essential step in calculating how much governments have to gain by imposing penalties on uncooperative tax havens, such an estimate is a concrete advance in the fight against tax evasion. Eight Percent of the Financial Wealth of Households To estimate the global
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located in London, New York, or Sydney: they buy financial securities—that is, stocks, bonds, and, above all, shares in mutual funds. The money in tax havens doesn’t sleep. It is invested in international financial markets. Now, it so happens that these investments cause anomalies in the international investment positions of
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reasoned debate. Nonetheless, it remains quite unsatisfying. First, the figure of $7 trillion greatly overestimates the value of the bank deposits held by households in tax havens. It includes many legitimate corporate bank accounts: German companies sometimes need to have an account in Paris, and hedge funds in the Cayman Islands often
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Panamanian shell corporations do today in the great world network of wealth management. Last, my estimate says nothing about the amount of nonfinancial wealth in tax havens. This includes yachts registered in the Cayman Islands, as well as works of art, jewelry, and gold stashed in freeports—warehouses that serve as
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described as rising much faster than average and are projected to continue to do so in the future.18 Bankers adapt to this new trend. Offshore banking is also becoming more sophisticated. Wealthy individuals increasingly use shell companies, trusts, holdings, and foundations as nominal owners of their assets. This is apparent in
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above all benefited the wealthiest among us. Ultimately, the costs calculated here are net of any social benefits accrued through the wealth-management activities of tax havens, for such benefits are almost nonexistent. From the point of view of rich countries, the offshore private banking industry creates no value: establishments domiciled
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developing countries that don’t have a well-established banking network, banks in offshore financial centers provide services that would otherwise be inaccessible (such as access to international financial markets); therefore, they are not completely useless. The Price of Tax Havens The government revenue loss that I estimate—$200 billion—is the equivalent of
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like relatively low figures, these are global averages that conceal substantial heterogeneity: some economies take a much heavier hit than others. Given the proliferation of tax havens in the territory of the Continent, Europe’s economy is the one that pays the highest price in absolute terms. According to my calculations, about
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public debt to GDP up; in response, governments have tended to slash spending, which has depressed demand, further reducing growth and increasing debt. Battling offshore tax havens would help reverse this deadly spiral. Greece wouldn’t have to impose as much austerity on its citizens to satisfy the demands of European authorities
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fewest treaties for information exchange with foreign countries.22 Between 2009 and 2013, Singapore thus gained the equivalent of 4% of the global amount of offshore banking deposits, Hong Kong, 5%; Jersey, on the other hand, lost 4%. For the most part, such movement represents a simple shell game: most establishments domiciled
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same time failing to catch the most aggressive tax dodgers. Notwithstanding, FATCA has been the starting point toward changing the ground rules that previously governed offshore banking. The key provision of FATCA is that foreign banks refusing to disclose accounts held by US taxpayers face clearly defined economic sanctions: a 30% tax
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interest income paid to them by the United States. That threat has proven effective in securing the (formal) cooperation of most of the world’s tax havens and financial institutions (whether real cooperation will ensue is less clear, as we shall see). Some large countries were initially skeptical—the Chinese authorities publicly
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compliant. But by and large, the 30% withholding tax has acted as a powerful-enough deterrent. This episode teaches us a second important lesson: apparently, tax havens can be forced to cooperate if threatened with large-enough penalties. Toward the Global Automatic Exchange of Information The upshot of the American support in
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found in large countries. Without access to foreign markets, tax havens are condemned to die. Justified and Realistic Sanctions Imposing trade tariffs on uncooperative tax havens is well-founded in economic reasoning. Each year financial secrecy—the lack of effective exchange of information between offshore banks and foreign authorities—deprives governments around the world of about
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a tax equal to the losses incurred by foreign countries. In other terms, zero or limited cooperation is a disguised form of subvention. It gives offshore financial institutions a competitive advantage, just as the absence of environmental protections allows polluting companies to be more competitive. Now, these forms of hidden subvention inhibit
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tax revenue that it creates. The estimates that this book proposes provide a start, because they are based on official statistics and verifiable calculations. The tax havens that feel wronged are free to produce their own estimates—under the condition, of course, that they are consistent with the available data, in particular
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France cannot achieve very much. Only combined international pressure can truly have an impact. The solution exists nevertheless: coalitions of countries can make the principal tax havens bend by imposing trade tariffs equal to the cost of financial secrecy. A Plan for Customs Tariffs Concretely, what do winning coalitions look like? There
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wealth. The same approach would lead to the cooperation of other large centers. In all cases, the large countries can legally make the giants of offshore banking bend, using relatively small coalitions. The Case of Luxembourg One country poses a problem, however, because it is protected from trade tariffs through European treaties
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was everything back then; finance was nothing. Today, without its financial industry, the Grand Duchy would be nothing; tomorrow, offshore finance may be everything (see fig. 6). It is the tax haven of all tax havens, present in all stages of the circuit of international wealth management, used by all other financial centers. Figure 6: Luxembourg
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to transform the millions of gross orders into a limited number of net operations. This clearinghouse activity is of marginal interest in the struggle against tax havens, unlike that of a central depository, because Clearstream and Euroclear are today the only two entities capable of authenticating the owners of trillions of dollars
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fiscal administrations, in order to enable them to verify that all the securities held by their taxpayers are indeed declared—and in particular that the offshore banks are exchanging all the information they have (see fig. 7). In the short term, the world financial register would not include all financial wealth,
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least; and large countries have themselves mostly given up taxing the profits booked outside of their territory. How do companies make their profits appear in tax havens? There are two main techniques. The first, that of intragroup loans, consists of loading with debt branches located in countries that tax profits heavily,
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to mobilize, in Europe and perhaps above all in the tax havens. I don’t believe that the majority of the inhabitants of Luxembourg—hardly 50% of which voted in the last elections—approve of the capture of the Grand Duchy by offshore finance. Nor do most Swiss accept the active aid that their
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et de législation comparée, vol. 1, 1909, p. 627. 22. Niels Johannesen and Gabriel Zucman, “The End of Bank Secrecy?: An Evaluation of the G20 Tax Haven Crackdown,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2014 6, no. 1 (2014): 65–91, http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/JohannesenZucman2014. 23. See US Senate, Offshore Tax
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Tariffs and Retaliation Revisited: How Country Size Matters,” Review of Economic Studies 69, no. 3 (2001). 27. On the commercialization of sovereignty, see Ronen Palan, “Tax Havens and the Commercialization of State Sovereignty,” International Organization 56, no. (2002). 28. For some details, see the website of the Regulatory Oversight Committee (ROC) of
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data, 64–65; sanctions and (see sanctions) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 91 Puerto Rico, 89 Rubik agreement, 20 sanctions: country benefits from harboring tax havens, 75–76; creating a coalition of countries to impose, 81, 84–85; economic justification for, 78–79; effectiveness of systematic penalties for noncompliance, 77; example
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evasion: in Africa, 32–33; cost of in the United States, 53; dissuading with a global tax on wealth, 100–101; dominance of use of tax havens (see tax havens); global cost of (see global cost of offshore tax evasion); history of, 8–9, 15, 18–19, 22, 23, 25, 57–58; revenues
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regulations, 110; tax avoidance by multinational corporations and, 103–4 UBS, 13, 67 Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS), 26 United Kingdom: anti-tax-haven coalitions and, 84, 85; asset/liability imbalance statistics and, 37; inadequacy of treaties and, 60, 69; inheritance taxes and, 59; leverage over Switzerland, 84,
Nomad Capitalist: How to Reclaim Your Freedom With Offshore Bank Accounts, Dual Citizenship, Foreign Companies, and Overseas Investments
by Andrew Henderson · 8 Apr 2018 · 403pp · 110,492 words
Chapter 6: Nomad Healthcare – “Go Get a Big Mac” K - Keep More of Your Money Chapter 7:Offshore Banking – “In Other Words, Just Being Smart” Chapter 8:Offshore Companies and Tax Savings – “Choose Your Tax
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offshore world you may have heard about on some spy show on TV have changed. Offshore banking, for instance, is not as easy as just dropping a briefcase of dirty money onto
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Money ● Tax Reduction - Legally reduce or eliminate your personal taxes by relocating your business the right way. ● Offshore Banking - Protect your money in quality banks and earn higher returns. ● Offshore Companies - Legally choose the tax
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around with three passports, a dozen foreign bank accounts, and a company in a Caribbean tax haven, you may as well be living in California and forking sixty cents of your every
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happened in Cyprus can happen anywhere. We will talk about specifics in the chapter on offshore banking, but suffice it to say that having only 10% of your money in Cyprus
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even for your health, directly from the source. K KEEP MORE OF YOUR MONEY Chapter Seven: Offshore Banking “In Other Words, Just Being Smart” Dateline: Bucharest, Romania It was a productive day
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citizens or residents living in the United States, the US is the world’s largest tax haven. For US citizens living abroad and non-citizens outside of the country, there are
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an overseas bank account can be accomplished with minimal time and expense. The Benefits of Offshore Banking I am not going to be one of those guys who scaremongers with stories that the
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can easily sell your dollars and buy pounds, euros, or renminbi at any time. An offshore bank account is an excellent way to get exposure to emerging currencies and profit from global financial
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“Tunnels” If you open an offshore bank account now – instead of waiting for some hypothetical future date – you will be able to reap another benefit to offshore banking: tunnels. To understand this concept,
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find a place to sit before all the available chairs were taken. I look at offshore banking today in much the same way. There are many great banks out there, but if
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door closes, you are already inside. What is Offshore Banking? Now, for many, it is not enough to know the benefits of offshore banking before they are ready to open their own account.
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Ask the average person what they think about offshore banking and they are sure to tell you that it is not
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what others do not. The rest of this chapter takes a closer look at exactly what offshore banking is, what it is not, the requirements you must follow to legally bank in another
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country, and – most importantly – the best places to legally bank offshore. When I say ‘offshore banking,’ what I really mean is merely banking in another country. If you live in the United
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the world just because they are ‘offshore.’ You will likely suffer problems. I use the term ‘offshore banking’ as a demarcation. Really, it is just choosing to go where you’re treated best. In
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favor you, then going ‘offshore’ is merely going where you’re treated best. What Offshore Banking is NOT Since this book is called Nomad Capitalist and not The Art of the Deal
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that are still out there, here is what offshore banking is not: Misconception #1: The Media’s Offshore Bank Many of the false beliefs about offshore banking are influenced by movies like James Bond and
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the mark. Takeaway: Get your information about offshore banking from someone who actually knows the offshore world. That includes ignoring the mainstream media’s portrayal of offshore banking, as well as seeking out expat-focused
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means having nothing to hide. Which brings us to one of the biggest myths about offshore banking: numbered bank accounts. This is the idea that you can open some numbered bank account
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down on you like a ton of bricks. Misconception #3: Offshore Banks are for People Who Want to Avoid Taxes The term ‘tax haven’ in general is a troubling one. As with privacy versus
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. You should be concerned by anybody who talks a lot about tax havens and how you should move to a tax haven country. When we talk about going where you’re treated best,
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some of the banks that I have seen in a lot of these so-called ‘tax havens’ are low quality. They end up causing people a lot of other problems, and
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It does not work that way. Takeaway: The marketing that talks about privacy and tax havens and tells you that you will not have to pay any tax because it is ‘
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to have a problem. Misconception #6: Why Would I Need an Offshore Bank? There is one final false belief about offshore banking, and that is the belief that it has no potential benefit for
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received nothing but trouble. That should not be the case. For the Nomad Capitalist, offshore banking is part of a diversified international lifestyle. People assume that the only reason to have
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for living a freedom-infused international lifestyle. The Legality and Requirements for Offshore Banking We all must follow the law. Having an offshore bank account is 100% legal (and, if you follow my advice,
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side of the law. Where to Bank Offshore The idea behind offshore banking is jurisdictional diversification to ensure return of capital in addition to better return on your
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tax havens like the Seychelles where the banks are hanging by a thread. You also have European strongholds like Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg that are part of the old offshore world and, for many individuals and businesses, no longer offer the perfect panacea for offshore banking
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bother banking in any of these countries. But who takes the title of “The worst offshore bank?” You might think that a small bank in a rather inaccessible part of the world
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banking solution, the reality is that banking with HSBC is miserable. There are many offshore banks that are just not worth the hassle and fees. That does not mean that you
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but that have not quite realized it yet – the ‘next Hong Kong’ of the offshore banking world. I have found that the opportunity is usually in the middle. Places like Hong
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offshore bank account today. Because it is somewhere in the middle of the offshore spectrum, a jurisdiction like Georgia has not seen the problems you find at the top and bottom of the offshore world, precisely because it is not a tax haven, nor is it a large offshore financial
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banks fell out of favor due to their aggressive marketing of shady practices, banks on the tax haven islands can no longer keep up with changing times. Takeaway: As globalization continues its aggressive
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many developing countries adds more and more ‘tax havens’ to the list each year. While ‘mainstream’ politicians may call you unpatriotic for going to a tax haven, the reality is that you are under
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are getting you some kind of special treatment, it is probably the opposite. Terms like ‘tax haven’ and ‘offshore’ can often get in the way of understanding what it really means to
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the whole structure, Delaware – when structured properly – is one of the world’s great tax havens, just not for people who live in the United States. In a nod to the
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that harbor. Nor has anyone ever protested by refusing to eat fish sourced from a tax haven. So, the Seychelles government sells access to an environment where, for $100 payable to
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out for you in a place like the Seychelles? For one, doing business in a tax haven is not as simple as it sounds. The fact that just about anybody can set up
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piece on companies moving their operations to Switzerland. Calling the moderate-tax country ‘the new tax haven,’ the show used extreme examples and sensational language to gin up anger against companies that were
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the sound of the words ‘tax haven.’ That is why politicians and the media use them. They are playing to their base. Watch any television show that involves offshore banking in the plot line and
Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy
by Richard Murphy · 14 Sep 2017 · 241pp · 63,981 words
Tax Havens 2The Problems of Secrecy 3What Is a Tax Haven? 4The Tax Haven World 5The Cost of Tax Havens 6Tackling Tax Havens 7The Post-Tax Haven
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tax havens, and after a decade or more of civil-society campaigning on this issue, tax havens appear still to be prospering. In my view, tax havens
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tax havens are fairly obvious. Firstly,
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens. Democracy, too, stands in need of salvation. A close examination of tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens to their foundations. This book is thus optimistic in tone. I do not underestimate the threat tax havens
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tax havens. If they enact measures that will shatter the secrecy created by lawyers, accountants, bankers and wealth managers operating from tax havens
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tax havens, but that
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Tax Havens
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tax havens, written with Ronen Palan and Christian Chavagneux: Tax Havens
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tax havens, to suggest what such action
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Tax Havens The existence of tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven problem is new, after
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens represented was produced in the United States in 1981, but crackdowns on tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax-haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven secrecy that the way in which tax havens
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tax havens, it is a
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tax haven secrecy has been, and continues to be, delivered. What is more, as I argued in Tax Havens along with my coauthors Ronen Palan and Christian Chavagneux in 2010, tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven would create a state of compliance that would signal the end of the tax haven era seriously misunderstood how the tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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Tax Havens Do Nearly twenty years ago, in the view of the OECD, the problem created by tax havens
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tax havens, imposing zero or nominal
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven: the blame was to be chiefly attached to the government and population of tax havens. The OECD was equally unambitious about what the key issue was: Tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven practices where none had existed before. The 1990s consensus view was then that a tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens and
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven jurisdiction for having to make the deduction. This option was also made available to the UK’s tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven and the tax authority of the state where the account holder lived, then all tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven jurisdiction; but the whole point of tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens perfectly. Indeed, tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens, powerful source: civil society. When the OECD tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens. A number of
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tax havens since it was first published. Firstly, a deliberate effort was made to expand understanding of the tax haven
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tax haven operations. Without it many of those using tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions. The focus on secrecy changed the official, if not the political, attitude to tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens, which
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tax havens
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tax haven campaigning high point. Every action by every authority that has been engaged with the tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven abuse have signed up
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tax havens, and the measures needed to tackle them. CHAPTER 2 The Problems of Secrecy The real problem of tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens in any introductory economics textbook aimed at undergraduates. Economists and politicians alike know that tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven secrecy, markets can be rigged. Secondly, we cannot see the accounts of tax haven
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tax haven competitor that
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tax haven
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tax havens can maintain and grow
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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Tax haven
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tax haven. If a person has a bank account in a tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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Tax Havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens based at the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, argues, ‘My main argument [i]s that we need tax havens
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tax havens seem to
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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Tax havens
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tax havens supply enables perpetrators to walk away from their actions. Those who support tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven activity. While it is obvious that tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens. They bought into the same doctrine as the economists who promoted the notion that tolerating tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven secrecy is still very largely
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tax havens
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tax havens
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Tax Haven? ‘Tax haven
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tax ‘haven’. Tax Havens Tax havens are not the same as offshore. Tax havens are real places that we can identify, whereas ‘offshore’ is a vague description of ‘elsewhere’. The term tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven for these people. But some tax havens are anything but accidental. In fact, what most experts consider to be the very first tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens, however,
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tax havens
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tax havens
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Tax Havens Do? Only two things happen in tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven investments. So, for example, shares registered in tax haven
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tax haven than is the cash referred to above. All the tax haven
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The tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven does is provide an opportunity to record the legal ownership of these assets. Yet again, the tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens. Tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven to be
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tax havens. That is because deception is a key component of all tax evasion, and the secrecy that tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven.
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens, these people
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tax havens
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tax havens
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Tax Havens for Corporations While it is undoubtedly true that the principal reason for a multinational company to use a tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven, and to the disadvantage of its competitors. That advantage is sought for one reason: the user of the tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens, and just two of the 100 companies surveyed had no tax haven
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tax haven is necessarily artificial. When the world’s largest tax havens
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tax havens is necessarily wrong. It is, after all, quite possible that a multinational company will actually trade in a tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven activity is also unavailable from the tax havens
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tax havens, as seems likely given the number of tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens. Gambling is another area in which tax havens
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tax haven
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Tax Haven World Tax Haven Products Putting aside the legislation that imposes light-touch regulation behind a veil of secrecy, tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven products, and
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tax havens
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tax havens. They operate on two levels: within the tax havens themselves, and in the places that tolerate their existence. Since the overlap between tax havens
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tax havens
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Tax havens
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Tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens are built. Without their presence, the local subsidiaries of all the major companies that locate their activities in these tax havens
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, including branches of the multinational banks that have operations in them, could not be audited – and without those audits tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens facilitate. As a result, it is almost impossible to see tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven without a bank, but there are very few banks based in tax havens
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Tax haven governments do not have the capacity to do this. Many tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven. There is little point in thinking of these offshore banks
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considered tax havens. It
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tax haven locations significantly outnumber its operations in France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Spain. A heavy tax haven
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tax haven location to another has been greatly assisted by the presence of STEP members in so many tax haven
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tax havens by the financial services industry, to suit its own purposes, means that tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven. There were, however, plenty of other indicators available. In the first Financial Secrecy Index we used twelve indicators of tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens it controls). This reflects a trend for the significance of larger countries not generally thought of as tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven abuse. What these case studies demonstrate is that, while it is undoubtedly true that some of the more conventional tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven abuse were supine in the face of the real tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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Tax Havens
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Tax Havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens was not a victimless activity. The next estimate of the cost of tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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offshore financial
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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Tax Havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens have a real economic cost, but so do the indirect ones. Because tax havens
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tax haven activity. The perverse fact is that those market ideologues who have promoted tax haven
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tax haven secrecy can be curtailed now, the reality is that all markets are at risk. Thus, beating tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven secrecy are mutually incompatible. When people see large companies and wealthy people using tax havens
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tax havens: they may not be able to afford the fees that tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven users to try to avoid and evade their tax obligations, however that goal is achieved. Tax havens
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tax haven activity – even if, at least in developed countries, the measurable impact in terms of revenue lost to tax havens is smaller than most people believe. CHAPTER 6 Tackling Tax Havens
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As I noted in Chapter 1, before 1997 there was no real demand for change in tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven secrecy.
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven reform. Gordon Brown and other world leaders sought to hand the blame for a US-made crisis on to tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens in
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven. Company C in the tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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Tax Haven Suppliers The solutions I have presented so far are aimed at eliminating large parts of the tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven activities might be a little
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tax havens
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tax haven information exchange rules, while ineffective in themselves, did create a change in behaviour among many users of tax havens
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tax havens is a crucial step but
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven abuse, and build a better society as a consequence. CHAPTER 7 The Post–Tax Haven World It is hard to imagine a post–tax haven
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world. For anyone who has only lived in the era of neoliberalism and globalisation that has existed since the 1980s, tax havens
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tax havens is
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven transactions falls, so too will the tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens will allow markets to work as they should. The fight against tax havens is thus part of the challenge of saving capitalism from itself. Government Without Tax Havens The post–tax haven
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tax havens. Perhaps as importantly, the increased transparency that will result from the abolition of tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven at
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven world deserves special mention. As
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tax havens by developing countries, because the secrecy that tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven activity is shattered by a new era of transparency. In short, in many countries the end of the tax haven era might deliver hope where it has been hard to find. Tax Havens in the Post–Tax Haven
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Era There remains the questions of what will happen to the finance industry in tax havens in a post–tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens. If the tax haven activity
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Tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens. For example, even though the City of London and the UK’s tax havens
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tax havens. This is because the City of London will very probably itself shrink as result of tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven activity will therefore have consequences in many countries that have preferred not to think of themselves as tax havens
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tax haven–linked activities on these economies as a ‘finance curse’. This means that tax haven
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tax haven–linked activity have created are eliminated from their economies. But the situation for those left in tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven locations claiming that they are the victims of the process of ending tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens will look very different after the transition to a post–tax haven
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tax haven subsidiaries as fast as they can. The inescapable fact is that the tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven politicians suggest that
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tax havens. It has also suggested that, if those politicians who have long been sympathetic to tax havens
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Tax Haven Era Finally, what of the social impacts of the post–tax haven
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Tax havens
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tax havens have contributed to this increasing wealth divide is growing. In a post–tax haven
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tax haven. It might still do so in a post–tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax havens
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tax havens that
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tax havens
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Tax havens
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tax havens. Appendix 1: Financial Secrecy Index Initial list of tax havens
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Tax Havens
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Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 110, 33. 4.See ‘Tax Havens
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tax havens).
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Murphy, ‘Tax Havens: Creating Turmoil
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Addicted to Tax Havens: The Secret
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Tax Havens Do Serve a Useful Purpose’, City AM, 10 May 2016. 5.Dan Mitchell, ‘Debating Tax Havens
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End Tax Haven
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Tax Havens
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Is a Tax Haven? 1.R
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tax havens
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Offshore Tax Havens”’, Glasgow
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Tax Haven
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Tax Havens
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Tax Haven World 1.James Knight, ‘Don’t Campaign against Tax Havens
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Tax Havens 1.Tax Justice Network, ‘Size of the Problems’, n.d., at taxjustice.net. 2.Available at Oxfam, ‘Tax Havens
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Tax Havens
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of Tax Havens:
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6Tackling Tax Havens 1
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tax haven
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Tax Haven Blacklist Proposals Risk Becoming Another Whitewash’, press release, 22 July 2016. 7The Post-Tax Haven
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Tax Haven
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tax haven initiatives 23, 24 tax havens
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–tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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tax havens
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tax haven
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‘Tax Havens
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tax haven
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tax haven
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tax haven companies 67 tax haven investments 59 tax havens activities 58–60 definition 54, 123 ‘Tax Havens
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tax haven
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tax haven activity cost 113 tax havens
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tax havens
A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption
by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins · 1 Jan 2006 · 497pp · 123,718 words
Gwynne traveled the globe on behalf of U.S. banks, helping ensnare Third World countries in debt. 3 Dirty Money: Inside the Secret World of Offshore Banking John Christensen At least $500 billion in dirty money flows each year from poor countries into offshore accounts managed by Western banks, dwarfing the amount
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capital flight to money laundering and drug trafficking. John Christensen was an offshore banker who found himself managing these secret accounts. He shows how the offshore banking system extracts tribute from countries that can least afford it and explains why this black economy has become essential to the international corporate elite. 4
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build mutually supportive relationships based on debts that will have to be repaid by ordinary citizens. • John Christensen worked for a trust company on the offshore banking haven of Jersey, one of Britain’s Channel Islands. There he found himself at the center of the EHM world, part of a global
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offshore banking industry that facilitates tax evasion, money laundering, and capital flight. In “Dirty Money” he reveals the workings of a system that enables the theft of
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.2 trillion deep—often with little real development to show for it. Much of the money simply round-trips back to First World suppliers or offshore banking havens. Meanwhile, a new era of imperial domination has begun with interventions to secure control of scarce resources like oil and coltan. GLOBAL NORTH G8
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NATIONS • MULTINATIONALS • WORLD BANK • IMF 1. FOLLOW THE MONEY S.C. GWYNNE Selling Money— and Dependency JOHN CHRISTENSEN Dirty Money: Offshore Banking LUCY KOMISAR BCCI: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad 2. DEBT-LED DEVELOPMENT STEVE BERKMAN The $100 Billion Question ELLEN AUGUSTINE The World Bank and
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same year or even the same month the loans arrived.”15 John Christensen describes in “Dirty Money: Inside the Secret World of Offshore Banking” how secret accounts in out-of-control offshore banking havens like Jersey and the Cayman Islands enable Third World elites to hide money they have stolen, embezzled, or derived from
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, leaving rank-and-file citizens to pay the bills. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International, incorporated under Luxembourg’s bank secrecy laws, pushed these offshore banking opportunities to new extremes, with as much as $13 billion being lost or stolen in the biggest bank fraud in the world. In “BCCI’s
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World Bank, and the Race to the Bottom,” the Philippine people are still struggling to repay debt accumulated during the Marcos era. —S.H. 3 Offshore banking havens enable the extraction of $500 billion a year from the Third World–a flow of dirty money that has become essential to global elites
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. Dirty Money: Inside the Secret World of Offshore Banking John Christensen Kuala Lumpur, July 1985: Maybe it was the heat, or perhaps the Guinness and Courvoisier had dulled my senses, but something about what
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few checks through the academic literature of the 1980s confirmed that there were virtually no studies of the role of tax havens or how they were interacting with the emerging globalized financial markets. Offshore finance still scarcely gets a mention in specialist texts on capital markets and world trade, let alone in the mainstream
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widespread perception that wealth, especially wealth from mineral resources like oil, was being expropriated by corrupt political and business elites and exported to offshore bank accounts and trusts in tax havens like Switzerland, Monaco, the Cayman Islands, and Jersey. The corrosive combination of huge inequality and social exclusion in these countries has nurtured deep
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, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, and their families and cronies who have used offshore accounts to hide their stolen loot and evade taxes. The argument that offshore banking secrecy protects human rights simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Oiling the Wheels of Globalized Business: The Mechanisms of Tax Evasion Much of the
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observers that the offshore world in which I and my colleagues were working is remote from the economy of the “real” world, but in fact offshore banking lies at the core of a globalized financial system that enables businesses and the superrich, known within banking circles as high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs
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offshore tax havens increase from twenty-five in the early 1970s to seventy-two by the end of 2005.17 More countries are lining up to create their own offshore finance centers. In February 2006, for example, John Kufuor, president of Ghana, announced his government’s intention to proceed with legislation to allow offshore financial services
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Oxfam estimated at $50 billion in 2000.22 Prostituting the Island Jersey, and other tax havens like it, provides an offshore interface that connects the regulated with the unregulated and the licit with the illicit. Superficially, the offshore banking world appears to mimic the onshore, but the lack of transparency and accountability means that
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require far more effective regulation of the financial networks that encourage and facilitate these activities. Supported by preferential treatment under the Basel I banking agreement, offshore banks have grown at an astonishing rate, but little attempt has been made to regulate their activities in developing countries or to crack down on the
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failure unless international cooperation in providing effective information exchange is made automatic and extended globally, and comprehensive measures are taken against the parallel economy of tax havens and offshore finance centers. One expert on money laundering quotes a Swiss banker’s claim that the failure rate for detecting dirty money flowing through that country
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dodge taxes, and the small business owners end up paying a lot of the burden of this taxation.” 4 How the U.S. used an offshore bank to run guns, finance Islamic jihadists, and launder money. How its Saudi sheikh owners and American insiders defrauded depositors of over $10 billion. And how
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, was skimming large amounts of weaponry and cash intended for the Afghan rebels. A decade later, as I began to focus on investigating the secret offshore banking system, I learned that, in a reach for market share that American business analysts might marvel at, BCCI had become the central banker for everyone
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, Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi, the last three part of the United Arab Emirates. The secrecy of offshore banking and corporations was the key to BCCI’s operations and deceptions. Offshore centers—also known as tax havens—allow clients to open bank accounts and companies with hidden or fake owners. They register “shell companies
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Wonder Woman fame. What happened to the billions of dollars sucked out of BCCI and never repaid to depositors? International banks’ complicity in the secret offshore banking system has effectively covered up the money trail. But in the years after the collapse of BCCI, Khalid bin Mahfouz was still flush with cash
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to line their pockets and use to speculate against their own currencies. 3. The debt flows laid the foundations for a new, highly efficient, global offshore banking network, which made it much easier and cheaper for corrupt elites to spirit funds to places like the Cayman Islands, Panama, and the Isle of
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tax cheats—and that their political power kept Western governments from acting against the system. Beginning in 1997, she shifted her focus to reportage about offshore banking. Much of what she has published over the last ten years (see www.thekomisarscoop.com) has never been published elsewhere. Based on her investigations, she
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.uk. Lobbies decision makers to change policies, and researches and promotes positive alternatives. Networks with people’s movements in the developing world. Dirty Money and Offshore Banking Baker, Raymond. Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free Market System. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Epstein, Gerald. Capital
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Countries. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2005. Epstein, Gerald, ed. Financialization and the World Economy. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2006. Hampton, Mark, and Jason Abbott. Offshore Finance Centres and Tax Havens: The Rise of Global Capital. London: Macmillan, 1999. Kochan, Nick. The Washing Machine: How Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Soils Us. Mason, Ohio: Thomson
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in 276 World Bank lending in 169–73 Asari, Alhaji 121, 123, 128–29 Asian “tiger” economies 21, 229, 257n16, 258n27 Azerbaijan 200 Bahamas, as offshore banking haven 45, 89 Baker, Howard 100 Baker, James 239, 256n12 Baker Plan 228, 239–40 Balfour Beatty 211 Banca del Gottardo 71 Banca Nazionale del
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Bretton Woods agreements 63 Bretton Woods institutions see World Bank, International Monetary Fund British Gas 139 British Petroleum 139, 144, 153 British Virgin Islands, as offshore banking haven 54 Brown & Root 99 Brown, Gordon 126, 127, 219, 250 Burkina Faso, foreign debt of 246, 249 Burundi 95, 247, 249 Bush, George H
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capital flight 24, 43–44, 231–36, 253, 258n27 Carter, Jimmy 76, 140 Casey, William 70, 82, 90 Cavallo, Domingo Felipe 238 Cayman Islands, as offshore banking haven 65, 72, 73, 74, 75, 86 Center for Global Energy Studies 145 Center for Strategic and International Studies 119, 120 Central African Republic 231
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, 247, 249 cooperatives 276–77 corporations, as legal persons 277 CorpWatch 278 corruption: culture of 51–54 IMF/World Bank and 24–25, 157–74 offshore banking and 44–45, 52- power and 24 privatization and 24–25, 256n12 COSEC 209–10 Council on Foreign Relations 119–20 dam projects, 209–12
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relief and 221–22, 224, 226, 237, 240, 243–46, 250–51, 252 Iraq and 151–53 Malaysia and 273 neoliberalism and 176–79, 222 offshore banking and 43, 234 protests against 266 structural adjustment programs 22, 23, 245, 265–66 Rwanda and 100 Uganda and 100 International Tax and Investment Center
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Japan Bank for International Cooperation 201, 202, 203, 241 Jersey 88 banking boom in 46–47 impact on island 46, 51–52, 56–62 as offshore banking haven 43, 45, 56–61 Johnson, Chalmers Sorrows of Empire 4 Jordan 241, 266 Jordan, Vernon 100 JPMorganChase 226, 238 Jubilee South 190 Jubilee 2000
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272 Liberia, World Bank lending to 159–67 Liberty Tree Foundation 276 Li Zhaoxing 117–18, 124 Lu Guozeng 117 Lumumba, Patrice 26 Luxembourg, as offshore banking haven 72, 73, 74 Madagascar, foreign debt of 249 Mahathir, Mohamad 273 Malawi 254 foreign debt 243, 249 Malaysia 41–43, 229 defiance of IMF
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Trade Agreement 4, 268, 272 nuclear power 205–6, 210 Obasanjo, Olusegun 125, 127 Obiang, Teodoro 48 O’Connor, Brian 144–45 OECD Watch 105 offshore banking havens: arms trade and 71–73 campaign against 62–64 central role in world trade 44, 47–48, 64–65 corruption and 24, 44–45
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–63, 250 Pakistan 90 Afghan mujahadeen and 70–71 BCCI and 70 export credit agencies and 207 foreign debt 244 Panama 3, 26, 72 as offshore banking haven 73, 74 Papua New Guinea: export credit agencies and 204 mining and environmental problems 204 Paris Club of creditors 220, 225–26, 227, 228
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, boycott of 280 Tanzania, foreign debt of 247, 249 tax evasion 43, 48, 49–51, 54, 57–59, 64–65 Tax Foundation 137–38 tax havens see offshore banking havens Tax Justice Network 63 Tax Reform Act of 1986 138 Tenke Mining 99 terrorism: as EHM strategy 26, 72 financing of 42, 88–89
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15 United Kingdom 213 NCP for Congo 102–3 empire 13–14, 115, 129, 145 Iran and 14–15 Iraq occupation and 146, 151, 152 offshore banking and; Suez Crisis and 15 United Nations: trade issues and 265, 276 Panel of Experts, Congo 100–106, 112n32 United Nations Conference on Trade and
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199, 201, 202, 204, 212, 213, 214 investigations of fraud 158, 162–73 Iraq and 151–52 Liberia and 159–67 Nigeria and 167–69 offshore banking and 43, 234 Philippines and 175–84 privatization and 100, 191, 277 protests against 266 structural adjustment programs 191–91, 265–66 World Economic Forum
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Men 1 Global Empire: The Web of Control 2 Selling Money—and Dependency: Setting the Debt Trap 3 Dirty Money: Inside the Secret World of Offshore Banking 4 BCCI’s Double Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad 5 The Human Cost of Cheap Cell Phones 6 Mercenaries on the Front Lines
Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil
by Nicholas Shaxson · 20 Mar 2007
system. Like a trick bookcase in a haunted house, Fiba spun Elf ’s cash back to front and upside down, then snaked it out through tax havens.35 Orders were transmitted verbally, then documentation was destroyed. African leaders got 20 to 60 cents of each barrel that Elf produced in their countries36
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to deals and fiddles.” Things could never get so bad in Britain or America. Or could they? Eva Joly suggests an answer, singling out one tax haven she found particularly obstructive: “The City of London, that state within a state which has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to
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,” she said. “It looks like a system.”65 The Elf Affair poses a question. Why did politicians use Elf as their slush fund, when offshore tax havens might have done the job, using public 98 Eva Joly money as the cash cow? And why did they use Elf ’s African subsidiaries, not
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companies in France, but this needs financial and political gymnastics to bypass the controls. There are limits to how far companies can be milked into tax havens before they collapse. With an offshore oil company like Elf Gabon, the systems to control abuse are mostly not in the hands of French regulators
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l l s Paris suburbs, as the political classes stumble from one scandal to another. A new affair over the clearing house Clearstream—also involving tax havens—is again troubling French politics. Massive public cynicism about the mainstream parties is feeding a rapid growth in far-right extremism. In France’s 2002
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shadowy former Fiba bank, the pillar of the Elf offshore edifice that snaked Congo’s, Gabon’s, and Elf ’s money around the world’s tax havens.13 In a book, two French journalists explain Bongo’s role: “He defends and promotes Elf not just in Gabon, but in Congo. He has
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oil concessions,21 at bargain-basement prices, and provided new loans at exorbitant rates. Bribes flowed through Bongo’s Fiba bank and the tax havens, while politicians looted the treasury. Tax havens are like one-way filters for money, sucking African economies dry: once rulers get their cash out, they know it is safe
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bank (BNP Paribas) in U.S., French, and British courts. Secret grappling is taking place in the same arcane world of lobbyists, offshore lawyers, and tax havens that foxed Eva Joly. Elliott Associates employed Kenneth Adelman, a former assistant to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and a member of the Pentagon
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excoriated Congo’s rulers.61 Congo’s state oil company has been putting hundreds of millions of dollars in weird special purpose vehicles (SPVs) in tax havens like the Cayman Islands.62 The SPVs are designed to be “autonomous in relation to [the state oil company] and the Republic of Congo”; in
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international airports, satellite dishes, oil rigs, French cafés, and air-conditioned hairdressers, all protected by attack helicopters, decorated with oil money, and plugged into the tax havens. In Makélékélé hospital in Brazzaville, I find the other world. A cry of pain fills the morning air, from a man hurt in a recent
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supposedly clean financial sectors are themselves offshore centers, using bank secrecy to hide and protect money that flows there. The United States is the biggest tax haven of them all, and a delight for foreign dictators. American oil companies and their friends have glossed over Obiang’s ways. Brian Maxted, Amerada Hess
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a helicopter, and he was released). International law is unhelpful to those seeking to prove a coup plot; and bank records were lodged in the tax haven of Guernsey, which did not cooperate. “This is not an area that lends itself to litigation,” said Antony Goldman, an analyst who knows Equatorial Guinea
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robber barons kept their money in the United States; Russia’s and Angola’s elites, by contrast, had at their disposal a wonderful array of tax havens and opaque shell banks, protected by successive layers of secrecy like the nested Matryoshka doll that I had bought by Red Square, to help them
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still cannot fathom his explanations for where all that money went. Any root-and-branch investigation would end at the cold stone walls of the tax havens. Is he a victim of the intestinal politics of the French elites? He surely is, though it stretches credulity to believe that he was an
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balloon of offshore dirty oil money that characterized the Elf Affair in Gabon. Money flows to political party factions, and out into the world’s tax havens; journalists complain that this is a terrain of smoke and mirrors, where nothing is as it seems. A well-informed source in Washington told me
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people are dimly aware of a murky world of offshore finance. But how big is the problem? Try these for size. The OECD reckons that about half of all the world’s cross-border trade involves structures for concealing money, involving about 70 tax havens (the French poetically call them “fiscal paradises”)3, as
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is here, many people believe. But 224 Conclusion no: New York and London—the playgrounds of Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, and African dictators—they are tax havens, too! Some now call the City of London the “Laundry of Choice,”8 with arguably worse controls even than Switzerland. The problem is the barriers
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like sheriffs in the spaghetti westerns who watch the bandits celebrate on the other side of the Rio Grande,” wrote Eva Joly, furious about how tax havens stonewalled her probes. “They taunt us—and there is nothing we can do.”9 There are basically three forms of dirty money. One is criminal
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tax collectors—is bigger. The point—and this is crucial—is that these three forms of dirty money use exactly the same mechanisms and subterfuges: tax havens, shell banks, shielded trusts, anonymous foundations, dummy corporations, mispricing schemes, and the like, all administered by a “pinstripe infrastructure” of mainstream banks, lawyers, and accountants
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only about African oil; it was also about French culture, identity, history, business, and many other things. But the oily African slush funds, linked via tax havens into the political systems of France, Germany, and many other countries around the globe lent the system special potency. Before Eva Joly, French people knew
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strange, complex, nebulous, and distant that it is sometimes hard to believe that it even exists. John Christensen, a former economic advisor to the British tax haven of Jersey who now leads the Tax Justice Network, says that British and American lawyers, accountants, and banks, notably Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Suez, and
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’s agenda, said Grover Norquist, a leading U.S. right-winger “is a direct threat to America’s economic interests. The United States is a tax haven, and this policy has helped attract trillions of dollars of job-creating capital to America’s economy.”12 These cries are reminiscent of a statement
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be coming from Africa, I would hazard a guess that we have a systemic and fast-growing problem on our hands. The dirty world of tax havens is no grand conspiracy, but a decentralized global terrain tucked away in the interstices between states. It is a problem of fragmented global political and
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privacy and national sovereignty.”16 Fourth, capital flows to lower-tax countries force governments to cut taxes competitively, keeping them on their toes. Finally, closing tax havens will be hard to achieve in a world of sovereign states. To the first argument I say this: I am all for the free flow
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the Tax Justice Network. “You might as well talk about environmental competition.” High taxes or low taxes? I recoil from the idea that competition from tax havens—which Christensen rightly calls “invitations to crime”—should trump what voters want. There are already perfectly good mechanisms for keeping governments on their toes, such
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bond markets (and inflation) will punish it. Another good mechanism is called democracy: bad governments get booted out. The final argument wielded in favor of tax havens—that it will be hard to tackle the problem—is the strongest, because it is so true. It is also the best reason why small
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. One adversary will be what Eva Joly calls the “media-industrial complex”—news outlets that themselves shuffle huge profits around tax havens to avoid taxes,20 and might well attack campaigns against tax havens. It is crucial to separate this matter—dirty money—from the question of whether or not free trade is a
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that nearly $500 million of Congo’s oil money passed through fake private companies controlled by the chairman of Congo’s state oil company, using tax havens. Court documents in New York describe a $650 million loan to Congo being covered with $1.4 billion in oil cargoes. Denis Sassou Nguesso, “L
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Cooperation Accords, 80 Corporate Council on Africa (CCA,) 131 corruption, 4, 26, 143, 193, 201; see also Resource Curse; Elf; Angola; Equatorial Guinea and banking, tax havens, see banking, taxation, etc bribes, commissions, embezzlement, 24, 46, 47, 92, 93, 100, 110, 155, 182, 213 and ethnicity, division, fragmentation, 11–12, 16, 21
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o i s o n e d We l l s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), 96 Offor, Emeka, 155–158 offshore finance, see taxation, tax havens, tax evasion oil and gas 1970s price boom, 3, 4, 5, 11, 15–18, 21–23, 96, 110, 115, 185, 197 1980s price crash
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, 91, 96, 179–180, 182, 224, 225 Tapie, Bernard, 87 Tarallo, André, “Monsieur Afrique,” 87, 90, 91, 93, 109 Tax Justice Network, 226, 229 taxation, tax havens, tax evasion, 95–100, 126–131, 202, 213, 224–229 and Britain, city of London, see Britain, banking, money laundering, city of London bank secrecy
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, tax havens, general, 88, 91, 93, 95, 100–101, 109, 130, 131, 181, 227 and criminals, criminal money, terrorism, 23, 88, 96, 98, 170, 174, 221, 225,
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World
by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope · 17 Sep 2018 · 354pp · 110,570 words
. Going forward, he really needed to control his own pot of investment money. To do so, Low prepared to dive deeply into the world of offshore finance. Chapter 5 A Nice Toy Washington, DC, August 2008 In the fall of 2008, Otaiba’s business partner, a Jordanian named Shaher Awartani, wrote him
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were backed by powerful Middle Eastern funds, he could attract even more money. To create the illusion, he turned to the opaque world of offshore finance. Low knew about offshore financial centers from his father, Larry, who had a myriad of overseas accounts. It was normal for rich Asians, fearing instability at home, or
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of secrecy, remain safe harbors for money launderers and other criminals to wash cash and avoid taxes. One recent estimate puts the money stashed in offshore financial centers since 1970 at $32 trillion—a figure equal to the combined economies of the United States and China—with hundreds of billions lost in
Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History
by Liam Vaughan · 11 May 2020 · 268pp · 81,811 words
tomes where they were met by Andrew Thornhill, one of the country’s preeminent tax barristers, as well as a fifth individual, who specialized in offshore finance and who had organized the meeting. On the agenda, a subject close to all their hearts: what to do with Nav’s large and rapidly
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approved, was even more complicated than Thornhill’s. Based around what’s known as a “personal portfolio bond,” it encapsulates why many people regard the offshore financial system with disdain. First, Harvey appointed a small, friendly offshore insurer named Atlas Insurance Management to establish a new company in Anguilla with the name
Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition
by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber · 9 Aug 2011
in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913) and then on certificates of deposit and subsequently on the borrowings by US banks from their branches in offshore financial centers including London. The process is Sisyphean, a perpetuum mobile; the history of money is a story of continuing innovations so that the existing supply
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the lines at each moment may require that the borrowers satisfy specific requirements. Consider the rapid growth of US dollar deposits in London and other offshore banking centers in the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, which was a response to the increases in interest rates on these deposits relative to interest
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or some other US city. Should the US dollar deposits produced in London and other offshore banking centers be included in the US money supply? The home-equity credit line is a recent financial innovation; banks and other lenders offer to lend
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bumped into the ceilings set by the Federal Reserve on US dollar deposits. The result was a large shift of US dollar-denominated deposits to offshore banks (including the branches of US banks) in London and other financial centers that were not subject to these ceilings. The surge in demand associated with
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to interest rates on US dollar deposits in London and other foreign financial centers, which increased and induced investors to move funds from domestic to offshore financial centers. The rapid increases in money supply growth in the United States and other industrial countries in the early 1970s contributed to sharp increases in
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and in other industrial countries; most of these purchases were funded with money borrowed from the branches of Japanese banks in London, Zurich, and other offshore financial centers. Financial liberalization in Finland, Norway, and Sweden enabled banks headquartered in these countries to source for domestic loans by borrowing in the offshore market
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circumvent these regulations. The parallel financial system developed alongside the traditional system in response to the regulations imposed on traditional banks; thus money market funds, offshore banking, and special investment vehicles are components of this system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a cost advantage relative to traditional mortgage lenders because of
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