Britain: Cracking down on corruption: world leaders meet in London - by Catherine Hardy

The Channel island of Jersey is only 9 kilometres wide and 15 kilometres long. However, it manages an estimated 1.6 trillion euros of international wealth.

The authoritiesthere are also watching today’s events in London closely.

While the island has historically low tax, it is not a haven, according to officials like Jersey’s Assistant Chief Minister, Senator Philip Ozouf:

“Every individual that wants to open a bank account in Jersey, that information is going to be transferred automatically on an annual basis to their home tax authority, so there’s no hiding place. So it cannot be said that Jersey is a tax haven. This is a label which needs to be consigned to the history books.”

Jersey maintains a private register revealing the beneficiaries of each company.

However, it has refused calls from leading economists like Richard Murphy, to sign up to a public one.

He is one of hundreds of leading economists who are urging the UK government to persuade its Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories like Jersey to sign up to one.

“A tax haven exists to create legislation for the benefit of people who aren’t there and provides a veil of secrecy to make sure those people can’t be identified to be doing so. That’s how we now define a tax haven.
This is what Jersey is doing – a low tax rate for the benefit of people who are not really in that island to undermine the tax system of another country.”

Read more: Cracking down on corruption: world leaders meet in London | euronews, world news

Offshore Banking Tax Evasion: Tax investigations launched over ′Panama Papers′ revelations

Panama Revelations : Tax Evasion

The 11.5 million documents from the files of Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca, the world's fourth biggest offshore law firm, revealed the details of hundreds of thousands of clients using tax havens.

The records, which were obtained from an anonymous source by German newspaper "Süddeutsche Zeitung," cover a period of almost 40 years, from 1977 until last December. They are alleged to show that some companies domiciled in tax havens were used for suspected money laundering, arms and drug deals, and tax avoidance.

Georg Mascolo led the research for the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" and two German broadcasters on the basis of the data from he law firm's files. They shared the information with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the international arm of the Center for Public Integrity, and a hundred other international news organizations. More than 370 journalists from 76 countries have spent a year going through the material.

ICIJ Director Gerard Ryle said: "I think the leak will prove to be probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents."

Mascolo said Sunday evening on German television that he expected the insight into the business of tax havens to be quite "explosive," adding that more revelations will come out. The news "is very remarkable because we have not had such insight into the business of these tax havens on this scale," Mascolo said.

The UK tax authority, HMRC director-general of enforcement and compliance Jennie Grainger said on Sunday they had approached the ICIJ for access to the material: "We will closely examine this data and will act on it swiftly and appropriately," she said. "Our message is clear: there are no safe havens for tax evaders and no-one should be in any doubt that the days of hiding money offshore are gone."

The Australian Tax Office said on Monday that it would investigate more than 800 Australian clients of Mossack Fonseca for possible tax evasion: "Currently we have identified over 800 individual taxpayers and we have now linked over 120 of them to an associate offshore service provider located in Hong Kong," the Australian tax office said in a statement. It did not name the Hong Kong company.

The law firm Mossack Fonseca has claimed the revelation of the data is a crime: "This is a crime, a felony," Ramon Fonseca, one of the firm's founders said on Sunday. "This is an attack on Panama because certain countries don't like it that we are so competitive in attracting companies," he said.

Juergen Mossack, the other lawyer who co-founded the firm more than three decades ago, was born in Germany in 1948 and moved to Panama with his family, where he obtained his law degree. Mossack's father served in Hitler's Waffen-SS during the Second World War, according to the ICIJ, citing US Army records. It said "old intelligence files" showed the father had offered to spy for the CIA.

The company has denied any wrongdoing, saying it has acted beyond reproach for 40 years and that it has carried out robust due-diligence procedures. The firm also operates in Switzerland, Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands.

The report listed twelve current and former national leaders - from Argentina, Georgia, Iceland, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, United Arab Emirate and Ukraine - among 143 politicians, their families and close associates known to use tax havens. Russian President Vladimir Putin's friend from childhood, the cellist Sergei Roldugin, was named as the linchpin in a scheme to hide money from Russian state banks offshore.

Among national leaders with offshore wealth listed in the papers were Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt's former president and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson.

More than 500 banks registered nearly 15,600 shell companies with Mossack Fonseca, according to the ICIJ's analysis.

While the use of offshore companies is not illegal, action to avoid payment of taxes can be. It can also have political consequences. The families of eight current and former members of China's supreme ruling body, the politburo, have been found to have placed wealth offshore.

A member of Fifa's powerful ethics committee acted as a lawyer for individuals and companies recently charged with bribery and corruption, according to the documents. Footballer Lionel Messi is mentioned in the document.

 Read more: Tax investigations launched over ′Panama Papers′ revelations | News | DW.COM | 04.04.2016

Offshore Banking: Britain under pressure to clean up Caribbean, S. American tax havens

British Overseas Territories in the Western Hemisphere will abandon their "tax haven" status as London struggles to raise cash and counter European charges its Caribbean and other overseas territories encourage tax evasion.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said London signed agreements with its overseas territories that will automate tax information exchange between Britain, its major international partners and Europe.

The sharing of tax information exposes bank account holders to tax collection authorities not only in Britain but also other countries and follows large-scale bank account disclosures secured as part of the European Union's financial rescue of Cyprus.

EU pried the information out of Cyprus by encouraging a media vilification campaign that focused on Russian account holders and suspected money laundering activities in Cyprus.

But the measure also targeted European tax evaders, Middle East financiers and anyone else interested in hiding assets from the taxman.

EU campaigns were aided by online leaks of alleged tax evaders' personal data. Luxembourg and non-EU Switzerland have also given in -- though only to some degree in the case of Switzerland -- to EU demand for disclosures.

Read more: U.K. under pressure to clean up Caribbean, S. American tax havens - UPI.com

Offshore Banking: Leaks reveal secrets of the rich who hide cash offshore - by David Leigh

Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world, from presidents to plutocrats, the daughter of a notorious dictator and a British millionaire accused of concealing assets from his ex-wife.

The leak of 2m emails and other documents, mainly from the offshore haven of the British Virgin Islands (BVI), has the potential to cause a seismic shock worldwide to the booming offshore trade, with a former chief economist at McKinsey estimating that wealthy individuals may have as much as euro 28 billion ( US $32billion) stashed in overseas havens.

In France, Jean-Jacques Augier, President François Hollande's campaign co-treasurer and close friend, has been forced to publicly identify his Chinese business partner. It emerges as Hollande is mired in financial scandal because his former budget minister concealed a Swiss bank account for 20 years and repeatedly lied about it.

The British Foreign Office depends on the BVI's company licensing revenue to subsidize this residual outpost of empire, while lawyers and accountants in the City of London benefit from a lucrative trade as intermediaries.

The new BVI data contains more than 200 gigabytes, covering more than a decade of financial information about the global transactions of BVI private incorporation agencies. It also includes data on their offshoots in Singapore, Hong Kong and the Cook Islands in the Pacific.

Read more: Leaks reveal secrets of the rich who hide cash offshore | UK news | The Guardian

More than euro 17 trillion (US 21 trillion) stashed in offshore havens - exceeding combined GDP of the US and Japan

Offshore funds presently exceed the combined GDP of the USA and Japan.

Wealthy tax evaders, aided by private banks have exploited loopholes in tax legislation and stashed over $21 trillion in offshore funds, says a report. The capital drained from some developing countries since 1970 would be enough to pay off national debts.

­The findings show the gap between the haves and the have-nots is much larger than previously thought.

The document, entitled The Price of Offshore Revisited, was commissioned by The Tax Justice Network campaign group and leaked to the Guardian. The report provides the most detailed valuation of the offshore economy to date.

"The problem here is that the assets of these countries are held by a small number of wealthy individuals while the debts are shouldered by the ordinary people of these countries through their governments," wrote James Henry, expert on tax havens and former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey in his report.

The document cites the world’s leading private banks as cherry-picking from the ranks of the uber-rich and siphoning their fortunes into tax-free havens such as Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and other off-shore banking areas. Also the City of London and the state of Delaware are mentioned as major conduits for these tax evasions.

Henry points the finger at the world’s top ten private banks, including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley SSB, JPMorgan Chase, UBS, Credit Suisse, Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, for aiding wealthy clients to dodge taxes.  According to Henry’s figures, the top financial leaders processed more than $6 trillion in funds in 2010, more than double the previous year.

The world’s premier multilateral financial institutions have paid almost no attention to this ‘black hole’ in the global economy.  It has been left to groups such as TJN to support the painstaking factual analysis underlying this report.

The G20 has repeatedly made calls to end tax-free havens since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, but these plans have still not yet come to fruition while the global banking system remains rotten to the core.

Institutions like the World Bank, the IMF, the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the Bank for International Settlements have ready access not only to the analytic resources, but also to much of the raw data needed to more precisely quantify the dimensions of this problem.

Why have they turned a blind eye so far?

EU-Digest

Eight Offshore Banks Probed Over Tax Rules in U.S. - by David Voreacos

Eight offshore banks are under federal grand jury investigation for facilitating tax evasion by U.S. citizens as part of a probe the Justice Department said has dealt “fabled Swiss bank secrecy a devastating blow.”

The department disclosed the probes on a section of its website detailing the Tax Division’s Offshore Compliance Initiative. In 2009, prosecutors charged UBS AG (UBSN), the largest Swiss bank, with aiding tax evasion by U.S. clients. UBS avoided prosecution by paying $780 million, admitting it fostered tax evasion, and giving the U.S. Internal Revenue Service data on more than 250 accounts. It later turned over data on another 4,450 accounts.

Prosecutors opened 150 grand jury investigations of offshore-banking clients, charging 30 people, and indicting 13 other people who facilitated the hiding of assets offshore, according to the website.

For more: Eight Offshore Banks Probed Over Tax Rules in U.S. - Bloomberg