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<div>=<div>=</div><div>2 22 an common dr</div><div><div>A whistleblower leak to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and other media led to reporting on Sunday revealing that Credit Suisse—one of the world’s biggest private banks—knowingly accepted “corrupt autocrats, suspected war criminals and human traffickers, drug dealers and other criminals” as customers.</div><div>
</div><div>Data on more than 18,000 bank accounts, holding more than $100 billion was leaked. The accounts included personal, shared and corporate accounts with opened as far back as the 1940s.</div><div>
</div><div>Nearly 50 media outlets have spent months investigating the data.</div><div>
</div><div>The German daily said it received the leaked data anonymously through a secure digital mailbox over a year ago. The newspaper says it didn’t make any payment or promises for the leak.</div><div>
</div><div>The newspaper said it evaluated the data with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and media partners including The New York Times and The Guardian.</div><div>
</div><div>The Guardian reported:</div><div>
</div><div>We can reveal how Credit Suisse repeatedly either opened or maintained bank accounts for a panoramic array of high-risk clients across the world.</div><div>
</div><div>They include a human trafficker in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend and executives who looted Venezuela’s state oil company, as well as corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine.</div><div>
</div><div>One Vatican-owned account in the data was used to spend €350m (£290m) in an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the center of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal.</div><div>The New York Times reported:</div><div>
</div><div>Among the people listed as holding amounts worth millions of dollars in Credit Suisse accounts were King Abdullah II of Jordan and the two sons of the former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak. Other account holders included sons of a Pakistani intelligence chief who helped funnel billions of dollars from the United States and other countries to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s and Venezuelan officials ensnared in a long-running corruption scandal.</div><div>
</div><div>The leak shows that Credit Suisse opened accounts for and continued to serve not only the ultrawealthy but also people whose problematic backgrounds would have been obvious to anyone who ran their names through a search engine.</div><div>A statement published by German newspaper from the anonymous source explained their motivation for the leaks:</div><div>
</div><div>"I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral. The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders."</div><div>
</div><div>“This situation enables corruption and starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue. These countries are the ones that therefore suffer most from Switzerland’s reverse-Robin-Hood stunt.”</div><div>
</div><div>“I am aware that having an offshore Swiss bank account does not necessarily imply tax evasion or any other financial crime. However, it is likely that a significant number of these accounts were opened with the sole purpose of hiding their holder’s wealth from fiscal institutions and/or avoiding the payment of taxes on capital gains.”</div></div><div>=</div>

<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/south-dakota/">https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/south-dakota/</a>no lnx twt
How 'insanely corrupt' South Dakota became a magnet for the wealth-hoarding megarichBrett Wilkins and Common Dreams October 06, 2021Experts on the wealth-hoarding strategies and subterfuges of the world's superrich are weighing in this week on why "billionaires love South Dakota" after a bombshell report revealed that the Republican-led state is a leading global destination for plutocratic tax cheats.One of the biggest revelations in the Pandora Papers—a gargantuan cache of nearly 12 million documents revealing the hidden wealth and secret dealings of hundreds of the world's wealthiest people, published Sunday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)—is just how much of a fortune-magnet South Dakota has become.Drawn by low taxes and some of the nation's most generous trust laws, "shady billionaires from around the world are going to South Dakota," said Chuck Collins, author of The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, and co-editor of Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).As a result, the Mount Rushmore State "now rivals Switzerland, Panama, the Cayman Islands, and other famous tax havens as a premier venue for the international rich seeking to protect their assets from local taxes or the authorities," The Guardian reports.Writing for Common Dreams Monday, Collins further explained:Findings suggest that South Dakota has sheltered billions in wealth linked to wealthy individuals previously accused of serious financial crimes and labor violations. Two examples: Brazilian orange juice baron Horst Happel was fined $88 million in 2016 for underpaying his workers. In 2017, he moved substantial wealth to a trust in South Dakota. Carlos Morales Troncoso was the former vice president of the Dominican Republic. He ran a sugar company called Central Romana... that was accused of human rights violations. He set up trusts for his daughters in the Bahamas that were moved, after his death, to South Dakota.Vehicles including granter-attained annuity trusts (GRATs) and so-called "dynasty trusts"—through which wealth can be sequestered for generations, even centuries—attract the über-rich to South Dakota by design.Suzanne Garment, author of Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics, wrote for NBC News Tuesday that "spurred by economic need," South Dakota has become "a leader in abolishing the rule against perpetuities—the old doctrine that limits the lifespan of a trust. One version of the rule says a trust must vest—that is, it must distribute its assets—within a stated amount of time.""But not in South Dakota," she continued. "In South Dakota today, a trust can last, well, forever. The state couples this permissive regime with strict secrecy. As opposed to records in states like New York, court documents relating to South Dakota trusts are permanently private: Even the existence of such a trust is not public.""As a result, it is virtually impossible to discover who has established a South Dakota trust, who benefits from it, or whether legal challenges to it have been filed," Garment added.Collins is calling on Congress to address the issue."Lawmakers should act at the federal level to shut down or discourage the formation of dynasty trusts and GRATs for the purposes of tax avoidance and dynastic succession," he said. "Actions could include the passage of a federal 'rule against perpetuities,' banning certain trust arrangements, and taxing income and wealth in trusts."South Dakota isn't the only place in the United States where the rich are hiding their treasures. Other U.S. states named in the Pandora Papers include Delaware, Florida, Nevada, and Texas."The world is going to be looking at us differently after the Pandora Papers," said Collins. "They're going to see that the United States is the weak link now in the system of global financial transparency."==<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/pandora-papers/">https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/pandora-papers/</a>The leak of an <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/10/03/pandora-papers-biggest-ever-bombshell-leak-exposes-financial-secrets-super-rich" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">enormous trove</a> of tax haven files over the weekend offered a further glimpse into the secretive world of offshore finance—a system facilitated by the U.S. and other rich nations—and prompted calls for immediate changes to global rules that let the powerful hide their wealth, skirt their obligations, and starve governments of crucial revenue."This is where our missing hospitals are," Susana Ruiz, the tax policy lead at Oxfam International, said in a <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/where-our-missing-hospitals-are-oxfam-reaction-new-expose-secretive-tax-havens" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">statement</a>. "This is where the pay-packets sit of all the extra teachers and firefighters and public servants we need. Whenever a politician or business leader claims there is 'no money' to pay for climate damage and innovation, for more and better jobs, for a fair post-Covid recovery, for more overseas aid, they know where to look.""Tax havens cost governments around the world $427 billion each year," Ruiz added. "That is the equivalent of a nurse's yearly salary every second of every hour, every day. Ordinary taxpayers have to pick up the pieces. Developing countries are being hardest hit, proportionately. Corporations and the wealthiest individuals that use tax havens are out-competing those who don't. Tax havens also help crime and corruption to flourish."Like the 2016 <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/05/09/panama-papers-goes-live-searchable-database-tax-evaders" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Panama Papers</a>, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' (ICIJ) <a href="https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/about-pandora-papers-investigation/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Pandora Papers</a> shine additional light on the functioning of a "shadow economy" that world leaders, celebrities, and billionaire business moguls—including some accused of egregious crimes—are exploiting to shield trillions of dollars in assets from transparency and taxation.The 11.9 million files obtained, analyzed, and leaked by the ICIJ reveal the closely-guarded financial maneuverings of more than 330 politicians and top public officials from nearly 100 countries and territories, including dozens of current national leaders."The secret documents expose offshore dealings of the King of Jordan, the presidents of Ukraine, Kenya, and Ecuador, the prime minister of the Czech Republic, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair," ICIJ notes in a <a href="https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/global-investigation-tax-havens-offshore/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">summary</a> of its sprawling cache of documents. "The files also detail financial activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin's 'unofficial minister of propaganda' and more than 130 billionaires from Russia, the United States, Turkey, and other nations."The trove also links prominent athletes, models, and artists to offshore assets, including India's famous cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, pop music star Shakira, and supermodel Claudia Schiffer.But Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, <a href="https://taxjustice.net/2021/10/03/pandora-papers-shows-transparency-failure-is-an-accountability-failure/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">cautioned</a> that a narrow focus on the individuals who have made use of an international tax system rigged in their favor diverts attention from the institutions and countries that have done the rigging."These personal actions are shameful and will no doubt come under great scrutiny in the coming days, but it's important that we don't lose sight of one crucial fact: few of the individuals had any role in turning the global tax system into an ATM for the superrich," Cobham wrote in a <a href="https://taxjustice.net/2021/10/03/pandora-papers-shows-transparency-failure-is-an-accountability-failure/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">blog post</a> on Sunday. "That honor goes to the professional enablers—banks, law firms, and accountants—and the countries that facilitate them."Cobham observed that the Pandora Papers—the product of a nearly two-year investigation by more than 600 journalists in 117 countries and territories—confirm that the United States is "the world's biggest peddler of financial secrecy.""The biggest blockers to transparency are the U.S. ... and the U.K., the leader of the world's biggest tax haven network," Cobham wrote. "We need full transparency so we can hold tax abusers accountable, especially when our politicians are among them. U.S. President Biden must match his own rhetoric on shutting down global illicit finance, and start with the biggest offender—his own country."[twt]as the ICIJ notes, the new files show in some detail "how the United States, in particular, has become an increasingly attractive destination for hidden wealth, although the U.S. and its Western allies condemn smaller countries for allowing the flow of money and assets tied to corruption and crime.""The Pandora Papers include documents from 206 U.S. trusts in 15 states and Washington, D.C., and 22 U.S. trustee companies," the ICIJ <a href="https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/about-pandora-papers-investigation/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">points out</a>. "The documents provide details about the movement of hundreds of millions of dollars from offshore havens in the Caribbean and Europe into South Dakota, a sparsely populated American state that has become a major destination for foreign money.""We in the U.S. should be embarrassed that we've become a magnet for kleptocratic funds," said Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.Conspicuously absent from the Pandora Papers is any mention of the wealthiest people in the U.S., including Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos—the richest man in the world. But as the Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/pandora-papers-offshore-finance/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">explains</a>, that could be because "the uber-rich in the United States tend to pay such low tax rates that they have less incentive to seek offshore havens."In response to the Pandora Papers revelations, Oxfam called on world governments to crack down on tax havens by taking a number of steps, including:<ol class="ee-ol" style="margin: 1em 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 40px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li>Ending tax secrecy on individuals, offshores, and multinational corporations. Set up a public register on the real owners of bank accounts, trusts, shell companies, and assets. Require multinational corporations to publicly report their accounts where they do business, country-by-country.</li><li>Increasing the use of automatic exchange, allowing revenue authorities access to information they need to track the money.</li><li>Ending corporate profit shifting to tax havens via new rules, and by setting a global minimum tax under the OECD's BEPS deal, ideally of around 25%.</li><li>Agreeing a global blacklist of tax havens and taking counter measures, including sanctions, to limit their use.</li><li>Setting a new global agenda on taxing wealth and capital fairly; addressing tax competition between countries on high-net-worth-individuals, either on income or wealth, against agreed standards.</li></ol>"Governments' promises to end tax havens are still a long way from being realized," said Ruiz. "We cannot allow tax havens to continue to stretch global inequality to breaking point while the world experiences the largest increase in extreme poverty in decades."
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</div><div>with apple pulled navalny voting app russia vlad cave/fail hid behind TOS?maps makes crimea part of russia 1119<div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">torres-sp</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">offshore banks double irish with a dutch sandwich?</div><div>=</div> =<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/companies-lobbying-against-infrastructure-tax-hikes-have-dodged-millions-in-taxes-report/">https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/companies-lobbying-against-infrastructure-tax-hikes-have-dodged-millions-in-taxes-report/</a>ahPresident Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan proposal would raise the United States' corporate tax rate to 28% in order to pay for infrastructure projects. Some large corporations, journalist Akela Lacy stresses in an <a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/09/06/infrastructure-bill-companies-tax-increase/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">article published by The Intercept</a> on September 6, have been aggressively lobbying against that proposal — and they include everything from pharmaceutical companies to financial firms, some of which dodged a fortune in taxes."Companies that…. lobbied earlier this year on issues related to tax rates in Biden's American Jobs Plan include Walmart, Oracle, Accenture, Bristol Myers Squibb, Shell and Walgreens, according to an analysis by Accountable.US, a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on public corruption," Lacy explains. "Executives at companies that have historically avoided paying taxes, like Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, and DuPont, have spoken out publicly against Biden's proposed tax increases."Lacy continues, "Shell and Walgreens lobbied earlier this year on corporate tax issues in the American Jobs Plan. Walmart hired a lobbying firm tasked with 'monitoring of tax proposals related to infrastructure' in the plan and proposed legislative efforts related to Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts. Accenture hired another firm to 'monitor the American Jobs Plan as it relates to corporate taxes.' Oracle and Bristol Myers Squibb, a multinational pharmaceutical company, used the same firm hired by Accenture to monitor and lobby on similar issues in the proposal."Lacy goes on to note how successful some of these mega-corporations have been when it comes to dodging taxes — and not only in the United States."A Reuters report last year found that from 2018 to 2019, Shell reported $2.7 billion through offshore tax havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes," Lacy writes. "In 2019, Australia charged Shell $755 million for six years' worth of taxes the company did not pay. The company reported that after getting tax refunds related to the closure of oil platforms, it paid no corporate income tax in the U.K. in 2018 on $731 million in profits."Lacy points to Walgreens as another company that knows how to dodge taxes."Between 2008 and 2014," Lacy explains, "Walmart held more than $23.3 billion in offshore accounts and avoided paying more than $4.59 billion in U.S. taxes, according to a <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/oxfam-us/www/static/media/files/Broken_at_the_Top_FINAL_EMBARGOED_4.12.2016.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">2016 Oxfam report</a>. In an arrangement internally known as Project Flex, the company routed money through an <a href="https://qz.com/1701404/walmart-allegedly-created-fictitious-chinese-jv-to-avoid-us-tax/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">allegedly fictitious Chinese subsidiary</a>, Quartz reported, which allowed it to avoid paying $2.6 billion in U.S. taxes between 2014 and 2017. The 2016 report from the U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP also found that Walmart reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despite having as many as 75."==<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner/</a>MEDespite the pandemic, which took a toll on many businesses across the United States, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner reportedly made substantial profits during their time working for the U.S. government under former President Donald Trump's administration.According to a report published by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, <a href="https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/jared-kushner-and-ivanka-trumps-final-financial-disclosures/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">the affluent couple's final financial disclosure reports, which cover the duration of 2020 up to Jan. 20, 2021, signal monetary profits of "$23,791,645 and $120,676,949 in combined outside income."</a>The analysis also highlights a number of questionable aspects of Trump's disclosure reports that centers on "fixed guaranteed payments she arranged to receive from a few entities to prevent a situation in which she would have a stake in their performance while she worked in the White House."CREW reports:Starting in 2018, Trump began receiving annually $100,000 from T International Realty LLC, $800,000 from TTT Consulting LLC, and $600,000 from TTTT Venture LLC. In her latest financial disclosure report, however, she reported receiving an extra $62,500 from TTTT Venture LLC and only $362,500 from TTT Consulting LLC. While the extra income from TTTT Venture LLC could be explained by the longer reporting period covered by her annual/termination report, it is not clear why she received less than half of the $800,000 guaranteed payment from TTT Consulting LLC in her final year working for the government.As for Kushner's financial disclosure report, CREW noted that although the former White House senior advisor had committed to selling his $25 to $50 million stake in Cadre over conflict of interest due to his work for the government, "the Office of Government Ethics withdrew the certificate of divestiture related to his plans to sell his interest in the company in June 2020," per his request.Kushner also unveiled "Kushner Companies BVI Limited," a new company he has formed offshore in the British Virgin Islands. The publication reports that it appears the new offshore company, which is one of many for Kushner, was formed in an effort to restructure some of his assets.The latest reports come as former President Donald Trump, as well as his family business, faces a number of pending investigations into potential fraud and tax evasion.Ivanka Trump and Kushner took no salaries from the government, according to previous disclosures; advisers of their status tend to make around $183,000 a year. But their decision to forgo this payment isn't necessarily a good thing, from an ethics perspective. Government workers are typically expected to make their money from the government itself so that they aren't improperly influenced by or dependent on outside entities while doing work for the American people. Kushner and Ivanka Trump could only choose to decline their salaries because they had so much income and wealth from other sources.<div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="from-your-siteheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/heres-why-ivanka-trump-and-jared-kushner-are-more-dangerous-than-the-president-journalist/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: lighter; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Here's why Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are 'more dangerous ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/john-bolton-details-how-ivanka-trump-and-jared-kushner-wield-power-behind-the-scenes/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: lighter; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">John Bolton details how Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner wield ... ›</a></li><li class="from-your-siteitem"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/ivanka-and-jareds-friday-night-news-dump-was-because-they-have-tons-of-conflicts-of-interest-report/" class="from-your-sitelink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: lighter; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Ivanka and Jared's Friday night news dump was because they have ... ›</a></li></ul><div class="around-the-webheadline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase; margin-top: 10px;">RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><ul class="around-the-weblist" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; width: 589.446px; list-style: none;"><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/politics/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-next-steps/index.html" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: lighter; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner face new cold post-insurrection ... ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/01/jared-kushner-ivanka-trump-final-chapter-in-washington-demolished-their-future" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: lighter; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">“The Stink of His Family Is Nearly Impossible to Get Off”: Jared and ... ›</a></li><li class="around-the-webitem"><a href="https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/jared-kushner-and-ivanka-trumps-final-financial-disclosures/" class="around-the-weblink" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: lighter; outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s; line-height: normal; display: inline-block; margin-top: 10px;">Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's final financial disclosures ... ›</a></li></ul></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div>=<a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-files-8-big-takeaways">https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/fincen-files-8-big-takeaways</a>many docs
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8 Things You Need To Know About The Dark Side Of The World's Biggest Banks, As Revealed In The FinCEN FilesThese are the major findings after BuzzFeed News worked with more than 100 news organizations to unravel the secrets inside 2,100 confidential documents filed by banks across the globe.
Picture of Jason LeopoldJason LeopoldBuzzFeed News ReporterPicture of Anthony CormierAnthony CormierBuzzFeed News ReporterPicture of John TemplonJohn TemplonBuzzFeed News ReporterPicture of Tom WarrenTom WarrenInvestigations CorrespondentPicture of Jeremy Singer-VineJeremy Singer-VineBuzzFeed News ReporterPicture of Scott PhamScott PhamBuzzFeed News ReporterPicture of Richard HolmesRichard HolmesInvestigations ReporterPicture of Azeen GhorayshiAzeen GhorayshiBuzzFeed News ReporterPicture of Michael SallahMichael SallahBuzzFeed News ReporterPicture of Tanya KozyrevaTanya KozyrevaBuzzFeed ContributorPicture of Emma LoopEmma LoopBuzzFeed News ReporterPosted on September 25, 2020, at 6:01 a.m. ET
This is part of the FinCEN Files investigation. To read more, click here. Want to help us expose corruption and hold the highest levels of power to account? Become a BuzzFeed News Member here.
This week, BuzzFeed News told the world about the FinCEN Files, an investigation based on thousands of government documents that BuzzFeed News shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The investigation spanned continents and involved more than 100 news organizations in 88 countries. As the articles have rolled out, millions of readers have explored them, and elected officials have called for change. Here’s just some of what the investigation found:
1Big banks around the world approve trillions of dollars of suspicious transactions despite their own staff’s warnings that they might be related to crime. Terror networks, drug cartels, organized crime rings, and rapacious kleptocrats have all benefited, using the US financial system to wash clean their illicit profits. The banks — and their shareholders — make a profit off all this activity, while the transfers help these notorious figures sow misery around the world.
2The US government is informed of these transactions through “suspicious activity reports” that banks file. Those reports are designed to aid the fight against money laundering, but experts say the system contains a crucial loophole: Banks are required to file alerts to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN — but not to halt the suspicious activity or to stop serving shadowy clients. Sources told BuzzFeed News that the vast majority of these reports, also known as SARs, are never even read, much less investigated. (SARs by themselves are not evidence of a crime, but they can support investigations and intelligence gathering.)
3Banks sometimes fail to take even basic steps to root out financial crime, such as determining whose money they are actually moving. But instead of vigorously cracking down on failures like these, prosecutors have engaged in a series of sweetheart deals that give banks a fine, amounting to a mere fraction of their annual profits, and a second chance to clean up their act. Our reporting shows that despite the tough talk that often accompanies them, these deferred prosecution agreements are toothless. Often, banks fail to fix their problems in the allotted time — but the consequences that prosecutors threatened never come to pass.
4HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, got a second chance after becoming a key financial conduit for narcotraffickers and money launderers. But even with a federal monitor, a judge, and prosecutors providing oversight, HSBC continued profiting from customers it deemed suspicious.
5Our investigation found that well before the mirror trades — one of the biggest money laundering schemes in memory — became an international scandal for Deutsche Bank, top executives there had been warned the bank was at risk of being exploited by criminals. At Standard Chartered, despite whistleblowers stepping forward and alerts filed with the US government, suspicious clients continued to use the bank, and prosecutors determined it had allowed illegal transactions for Iranian clients.
6The problems with money laundering aren’t just confined to one bank or one country. The FinCEN Files investigation also documented that after they were singled out for misconduct, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of New York Mellon, HSBC, Standard Chartered, and Deutsche Bank continued to move money for suspected criminals.
7The rivers of suspicious money circulating the globe trickle into every country and countless industries, touching familiar products and companies from sports to real estate to everyday consumer goods. It’s so spread out and so unregulated that it’s hard to separate the dark economy from what people think of as the legitimate economy.
8The problems described in this series have been around for decades. They won’t be easy to fix, and there are powerful forces aligned to maintain the status quo. Many experts say prosecuting bank executives — which was US policy until recently — would be a big step in the right direction. The FinCEN Files has begun to serve as a galvanizing force as lawmakers, advocates, and experts in the US and UK seize on a chance for change and consider a variety of reforms.Caterpillar, for example, saved $2.4 billion between 2000 and 2012 by funneling its global parts business through a Swiss subsidiary (a ruse so audacious that one of its tax consultants <a href="denied:%20%20%20http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/business/at-hearing-caterpillar-defends-tax-practices.html?r=0" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" font-style="font-style" inherit="inherit" font-weight="font-weight" text-align="text-align" justify="justify" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" border="border" outline="outline" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" none="none">warned</a> Caterpillar executives to “get ready to do some dancing” when called before Congress to justify it).  <div></div><div>mofo mnuchin tax dodge </div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-trump-quietly-handed-billions-more-in-tax-breaks-to-huge-corporations-report/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-trump-quietly-handed-billions-more-in-tax-breaks-to-huge-corporations-report/</a></div><div>
</div><div><div>n o lnx</div><div>
</div><div>How Trump quietly handed billions more in tax breaks to huge corporations: report</div><div>
</div><div>Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams December 30, 2019</div><div>215</div><div>
</div><div>A “disturbing” New York Times story published Monday detailed how President Donald Trump’s Treasury Department, led by former Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin, has quietly weakened elements of the 2017 tax law in recent months to make it even friendlier to wealthy individuals and massive corporations.</div><div>
</div><div>Lobbyists representing some of the largest corporations in the world, the Times reported, targeted two provisions in the original 2017 law designed to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from companies that had been dodging U.S. taxes by stashing profits overseas.</div><div>
</div><div>“The corporate lobbying campaign was a resounding success,” the Times noted. “Through a series of obscure regulations, the Treasury carved out exceptions to the law that mean many leading American and foreign companies will owe little or nothing in new taxes on offshore profits… Companies were effectively let off the hook for tens if not hundreds of billions of taxes that they would have been required to pay.”</div><div>
</div><div>The two provisions are known by the acronyms BEAT (base erosion and anti-abuse tax) and GILTI (global intangible low-taxed income). Shortly after Trump signed the $1.5 trillion tax bill—which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%—lobbyists from major American companies like Bank of America and General Electric as well as foreign banks swarmed the White House in an effort to gut the BEAT and GILTI taxes.</div><div>
</div><div>Trump’s Treasury Department largely granted the lobbyists’ wishes, turning what was already a massive corporate handout into an even more generous gift to big companies and banks.</div><div>
</div><div>The Times reported:</div><div>
</div><div>The Organization for International Investment—a powerful trade group for foreign multinationals like the Swiss food company Nestlé and the Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell—objected to a Treasury proposal that would have prevented companies from using a complex currency-accounting maneuver to avoid the BEAT… This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.</div><div>
</div><div>The lobbying surrounding the GILTI was equally intense—and, once again, large companies won valuable concessions… News Corporation, Liberty Mutual, Anheuser-Busch, Comcast and P.&G. wrote letters or dispatched lobbyists to argue for the high-tax exception. After months of meetings with lobbyists, the Treasury announced in June 2019 that it was creating a version of the exception that the companies had sought.</div><div>
</div><div>David Enrich, financial editor for the Times, said the newspaper’s estimate that major companies received tens of billions of dollars in additional tax breaks thanks to the Treasury Department is “conservative.”</div><div>
</div><div>“The cumulative effect,” said Enrich, “is that a tax law already disproportionately benefiting the richest of the rich has become an even greater windfall for the world’s largest companies and their shareholders.”</div><div>
</div><div>David Enrich</div><div>@davidenrich</div><div>Replying to @davidenrich</div><div>The ridiculous thing: companies appear to not be properly disclosing what they’re paying under these new taxes. Which makes it very hard to see how big this bonanza really is. Our estimate of tens of billions in savings is conservative. By @uwsgeezer https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/business/corporate-tax-cuts-impact.html …</div><div>
</div><div>A section of the Senate bill. Congress gave final approval to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on Dec. 20, 2017.</div><div>Why the Impact of the Trump Taxes Remains Partly Hidden</div><div>New taxes should be a big expense for many companies. But they have found a way around disclosing it in annual reports.</div><div>
</div><div>nytimes.com</div><div>
</div><div>Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted in response to the Times story that “Trump is the most corrupt president in history, and here’s the latest example of how that corruption helps giant corporations at the expense of small businesses and working families.”</div><div>
</div><div>“Too many corporations are cashing in on all the benefits of America while skipping out on the bill,” said Warren. “Companies that make massive profits shouldn’t be paying less in federal income taxes than working families.”</div><div>
</div><div>As Hunter Blair of the Economic Policy Institute noted on the two-year anniversary of the passage of Trump’s tax cuts last week, “the $4,000 annual boost to average incomes that the White House Council of Economic Advisers promised to working families because of the [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] did not—and will not—happen.”</div><div>
</div><div>“While it’s been worse-than-advertised for working families,” Blair wrote, “the TCJA has been an even bigger boon to large corporations and rich households.”</div></div><div>
</div><div></div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/massive-leak-of-data-reveals-new-money-hiding-secrets-of-superrich-and-this-is-only-the-beginning/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/massive-leak-of-data-reveals-new-money-hiding-secrets-of-superrich-and-this-is-only-the-beginning/</a>no lnx
Massive leak of data reveals new money-hiding secrets of superrich — and this is ‘only the beginning’
Written by Common Dreams December 5, 2019A massive trove of documents, data, and recorded phone calls showing how British company Formations House works to hide money for the superrich is being reported on by journalists all over the world, with the first stories dropping at midnight on Wednesday.
The reporting is being done under the name “29 Leaks,” a reference to Formations House’s original address at 29 Harley Street in London. The data was leaked to the group Distributed Denial of Secrets over the summer.
“It takes a concerted effort from a large number of people to make substantive headway on an investigation like this, in which a large amount of data needs to be quickly processed and examined,” Claire Peters, executive director of the Pursuance Project, told Unicorn Riot on Tuesday.
Peters and Pursuance Project outreach director Annalise Burkhart led a team of reporters from around the world uncovering and detailing the information stored in the huge, roughly 100 GB-sized trove of data.
“Formations House was the perfect example of a ‘one-stop shop’ for creating legal entities that serve as fronts for fraudulent operations and money laundering,” said Burkhart. “In only a matter of days, a client could purchase offshore companies bundled into packages touting minimal compliance requirements, tax-free operations, and anonymity for directors and shareholders.”
“It’s hard to overstate how notorious and suspicious the firm is,” Boing Boing wrote of Formations House when the leak’s existence became public in July.
According to Unicorn Riot, reporting from the data will have an international scope:
Formations House has been the subject of international scrutiny for years, and the #29Leaks documents have been under investigation for some time. It is expected that news stories in Central America, Africa and Europe will examine information drawn from this set of leaks. The use of Formations House-managed companies to move money around between offshore and private banking centers like Luxembourg and other parts of the world is among the main themes of this dataset. Other documents expected to be covered in detail show how the African nation of The Gambia is commonly used to create banks and insurance companies on paper for wealthy people in other continents, which Formations House and related parties package and facilitate.
On Tuesday The Times of London showed, via undercover reporting, how Formations House sets up shell companies for its clients.
McClatchy reported on how Formations House helped Iran’s national oil company avoid sanctions. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project detailed schemes across Eastern Europe. The Economic Times, meanwhile, dug into the comapny’s Pakistani-British management.
More reporting will come, said the Pursuance Project’s Peters.
“There’s much more work to be done with this data,” said Peters, “we’re only at the beginning.”<div>=</div><div>
</div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/another-betrayal-trump-promised-to-bring-offshore-profits-home-but-hes-doing-the-opposite/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/another-betrayal-trump-promised-to-bring-offshore-profits-home-but-hes-doing-the-opposite/</a></div><div>
</div><div>an 1019</div><div>'<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/another-betrayal-trump-promised-to-bring-offshore-profits-home-but-hes-doing-the-opposite/" style="font-family: " open="Open" sans="Sans" sans-serif="sans-serif" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" color="color" transition="transition" all="all" s="s" ease="ease" cursor="cursor" pointer="pointer" font-size="font-size" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" line-height="line-height" display="display" inline="inline" important="important">Another betrayal’: Trump promised to bring offshore profits home — but he’s doing the opposite</a></div><div class="mag-header" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 19px; padding: 0px; position: relative; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="grid-post-box-meta mag-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 7px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/igor-derysh/" title="Posts by Igor Derysh" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Igor Derysh</a> / <a href="https://www.alternet.org/author/salon/" title="Posts by Salon " class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Salon</a></div></div><div class="mag-excerpt entry-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Trump administration is considering a rule change that would make it easier for American companies to stash money offshore to avoid U.S. taxes, despite the president’s repeated campaign promises…
no lnx
‘Another betrayal’: Trump promised to bring offshore profits home — but he’s doing the opposite
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon October 11, 2019
The Trump administration is considering a rule change that would make it easier for American companies to stash money offshore to avoid U.S. taxes, despite the president’s repeated campaign promises to bring offshore cash back home.
The Treasury Department is looking to weaken or eliminate Obama-era regulations aimed at preventing companies from moving their income to their overseas branches to lower their U.S. tax bill, Bloomberg reports. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, instead wants to replace the existing rules with “something more business friendly.”
The move would be a boon to large corporations, who already saw their taxes permanently slashed by the Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited companies at the expense of individual taxpayers.
Prior to the 2016 rule, companies were able to move money to their offshore branches that they could then lend to their American branches, while deducting the interest from the tax bill. The Obama-era rule allowed the IRS to consider these inter-company loans as equity, which eliminated a key incentive for companies to move profits overseas.
Democrats slammed the administration for trying to weaken rules that allow tax avoidance when it should be creating tougher ones.
“One of the Trump administration’s top priorities has been making it as easy as possible for the wealthiest Americans and corporations to cheat and avoid taxes,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement. “Rules preventing the offshoring of corporate profits should be strengthened — not weakened.”
Critics of the rule say it is no longer necessary because the tax cuts made these inter-company loans less attractive, according to Bloomberg.
Mark Mazur, Obama’s former assistant secretary for tax policy at Treasury when the rule was created, disputed that claim.
“On the face, they do slightly different things and so it’s hard to believe that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took care of every one of those dimensions,“ he told Bloomberg.
On its face, Republican criticism of the rule simply doesn’t align with reality. Trump had earlier claimed that the 2017 tax cuts would bring back $4 trillion in offshore profits that had been stashed overseas. Through the end of 2018, his claim fell about $3.3 trillion short, Bloomberg reported earlier this year.
The tax law slashed the rate on repatriated profits from 35 percent to a onetime 15.5 percent tax rate on cash and an 8 percent tax on non-cash assets. Trump claimed that the change would bring back $4 trillion in offshore profits, even though banks estimated that only about $1.5 trillion to $2.5 trillion was held offshore by U.S. companies. Corporations brought back less than $670 billion from the time the tax law was enacted until the end of 2018.
Researchers also rejected Trump’s claim that the repatriated profits would boost investment in the U.S.
“Policy changes have a relatively small impact on hiring and investment decisions if firms have relatively easy access to credit markets,” said a 2018 report from researchers at the University of Richmond and Claremont McKenna College.
Instead, companies have been using their tax savings for stock buybacks, in which companies buy back their own stock to return more money to shareholders.
A report from Citigroup found that companies in the S&P 500 spent more than $800 billion on stock buybacks in 2018, far more than the total amount spent on investing in new equipment or the total amount of repatriated cash.
Last year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, introduced a bill that would close loopholes in the tax law to equalize tax rates on domestic and foreign profits.
“President Trump promised the American people he’d end the march of jobs and profits overseas,” Whitehouse said in a statement at the time. “Instead, he’s doled out massive new tax breaks that reward offshoring.”
Democrats again called out Trump for trying to help major corporations rather than workers.
“Another betrayal by President Trump — choosing corporations over American workers,” wrote Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. “Shameful.”</div><div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-multinational-corporations-pad-their-budgets-with-the-wealth-of-developing-countries/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-multinational-corporations-pad-their-budgets-with-the-wealth-of-developing-countries/</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Amazon.com Inc. was brought to court by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2017 for transfer pricing discrepancies. In 2005 and 2006, the multinational techcompany transferred $255 million in royalty payments to its tax haven in Luxembourg, but according to the IRS these royalty payments should have amounted to $3.5 billion. This transfer pricing adjustment would have increased Amazon’s federal tax payments by more than <a href="https://mnetax.com/amazon-wins-transfer-pricing-case-tax-court-20243-20243" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">$1 billion</a>. Even for the U.S., a country with decent (although waning) infrastructure, the loss of this much cash in federal tax revenue is substantial. Take for instance the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—if the city’s estimated costs of <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/22/flints-crisis-can-be-fixed-with-55m-in-new-pipes-lansing-mayor.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">$55 million</a> to replace the pipes are accurate, then Amazon’s tax payments could have saved the 100,000 residents from lead poisoning 18 times over.<div class="p2_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="alt_ad_block story-page-in-content-graph-2" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Water supply is not the only infrastructural problem that arises when export countries suffer from a dramatic loss of tax revenue. Education, hospitals, telecommunications, and roads also decline. And in developing countries—the countries that endure the most severe backlashes of transfer and trade mispricing—this infrastructure is often never properly constructed in the first place. The much-needed cash is, instead, sitting in a tax haven.<div class="p3_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The anonymous whistleblower who, in 2015, leaked the 11.5 million documents that we now know as the “Panama Papers” shared in a <a href="https://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/572c897a5632a39742ed34ef/" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">manifesto</a> that “income inequality” was their motivation in revealing the levels of financial abuse that tax havens create. A key concern for the whistleblower is that tax havens are “metastasizing” across the earth’s surface—214,000 offshore entities are cited in the Panama Papers. The “metastasizing” certainly continued after the release of the Panama Papers—just two years later, a <a href="https://uspirgedfund.org/reports/usp/offshore-shell-games-2017" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">U.S. PIRG study</a> found that 73 percent of the Fortune 500 companies operated 9,755 tax haven subsidiaries....as being “the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share, depriving governments, rich and poor, of the resources they need to provide vital public services and tackle rising inequality.”<div class="p4_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Tax havens are a geopolitical <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/tax-haven-curse/491411/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">nightmare</a>, and transfer pricing is a legal accounting trick to get money into tax havens.Transfer Mispricing, Defined<div class="p6_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">There’s a wide range of these kinds of tax avoidance games played by multinationals: Transfer mispricing, abusive transfer pricing, trade misinvoicing, base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), and re-invoicing—they all fall under the umbrella of trade mispricing, or the intentional falsification of transactions on an international level, and are the process that has allowed the old colonial relations of productions to continue. Arguably, the polynymity of this deceptive practice is evidence of its ubiquity, but “thievery” could just as well replace any of these titles.<div class="p7_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The short-term goals for mis- or re-invoicing vary. In some cases the desired outcome is to dodge capital controls (a strategy commonly used in emerging markets to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110324021806///www.mof.go.jp/jouhou/soken/kenkyu/ron056.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reduce</a> rapid cash outflows). In other cases, the incentive for misinvoicing is to claim tax incentives or avoid paying duty. Generally, the scheme is this: shift profits out of high tax countries and into low tax countries, or tax havens, while ensuring that the majority of the expenses are assigned to high tax countries.<div class="p8_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">In 2015, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) published a <a href="https://secureservercdn.net/45.40.149.159/34n.8bd.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/IFF-Update_2015-Final-1.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">study</a> revealing that in 2013 an astounding US$1.1 trillion was stolen annually—or nearly $3 billion a day—from developing countries due to trade mispricing. If you wonder why developing countries seem rather slow to develop, here’s a big part of the answer. The head-spinning loss of $3 billion a day in taxable revenue begs the question: is “corporate practice” simply legal thievery?... the pricing of commodities traded between or within multinational enterprises—is a legal practice and a key feature of cross-border and intra-firm transactions. The United Nations prefers to use the broader phrase “trade pricing” in addressing this practice and defines it as a “<a href="https://www.un.org/esa/ffd/tax-committee/ta-transfer-pricing.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">normal incident</a> of the operations of multinational enterprises (MNEs).” Because the word “incident” evokes concern, it should not go unnoticed. One of the most disruptive consequences of transfer pricing is that international transactions are now governed by the common interests of the “associated enterprises” of an MNE group. That is, market forces no longer control the transactions because with the allowance of transfer pricing, an increasing percentage of global trade (this includes the international transfer of goods and services, capital, and intangible goods, or intellectual property) now occurs as an internal practice between affiliated entities.<div class="p11_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Theoretically, internal transfer pricing is supposed to follow the arm’s length principle. This principle follows the idea that transfer prices should be controlled and recorded as if internal trades were happening amongst independent entities, or at “arm’s length.” But like the IRS case against Amazon.com reveals, proving arm’s length is not so straightforward. So while the “arm’s length principle” is very much written into place (<a href="https://www.oecd.org/ctp/transfer-pricing/transfer-pricing-country-profiles.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Brazil is listed</a> as the only country without domestic legislation or regulation that makes reference to the arm’s length principle), even research from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations recognize that this principle is very much impossible to implement.<div class="p12_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Unable to ignore the ease with which a company could engage in abusive transfer pricing, the OECD and the G20 countries first drafted the “<a href="https://www.oecd.org/ctp/BEPSActionPlan.pdf" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">BEPS Action Plan</a>” in 2013 as part of a broader effort to enhance transparency for tax administrations to assess transfer pricing. At large, base erosion and profit shifting undermine the integrity of any tax system. But the direct “harm” BEPS created for individual taxpayers and governments was only part of the motivation for implementing the 2013 action plan. The other motivating factor was the added risk to businesses, including the risk to an MNE’s reputation in the event its effective tax rate was viewed as being “too low” as it would impede, locally, “fair competition” for corporations functioning only in those domestic markets. With this latter motivation, little promise ought to be expected from the plan as it maintains a focus on risks brought to MNEs.<div class="p13_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Setting potential reputation risks aside, the incentive for companies to strategically misprice trade or shift their profits is to avoid tax or duty payments. The incentive is to shield wealth. And while there is no single way to avoid tax payments and dues, there is one necessary component: tax haven subsidiaries. ...Tax haven subsidiaries function as cash canals to transport taxable profits with the goal of lowering or, if you are Amazon Inc., entirely avoiding tax payments. But a company’s subsidiary in a tax haven requires financial sleights of hand to get the cash safe. Take for instance the Goldcrest method Amazon used in Luxembourg. It shifted its intellectual property rights (or intangibles) that were held by its U.S. parent company to its subsidiary, Amazon Lux. The subsidiary then collected royalties tax-free on international sales. Google and Ikea, similarly, decided to play the “Going Dutch” move, using their subsidiaries in the Netherlands.<div class="p16_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The “Swiss Sidestep” is another tax play, and rather than royalty payments, “management service fees” are the key element. By paying a value-added service fee to a sister company in a European tax haven, a company can “side-step” tax payments by converting profits into fees. And, then, of course, there is the privacy and protection that a company gets on the island of Mauritius—with the “Mauritius Maneuver” a person can send their cash to Mauritius to avoid income tax and then bring it back—without a trace—as “foreign investment.” ...Each of these fictional narratives that frame the legal movement of cash across borders has one theme in common: wealth protection and, therefore, poverty production.<div class="p18_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Colonial Undertones of Transfer Pricing<div class="p19_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">It is not the case that some industries are more prone than others to transfer mispricing, or even that developed countries are immune to this manipulative business practice—the IRS case against Amazon is a great example of this. But, it is the case that developing countries are more vulnerable to the impact of transfer mispricing. Suppose a company extracts 2 megatons (MT) of cobalt from Papua New Guinea (PNG) and then exports the 2 MT (or 1 million kilograms) at the price of US$5 per kilogram, but imports into Canada—by way of Mauritius or the Netherlands—the same 2 MT of cobalt at the price of US$10. The result for PNG is the loss of tax revenue on $5 million. Even at a mere 5 percent tax rate with these modest and imaginative figures, a loss of US$250,000 for PNG is significant.<div class="p20_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The impact of trade and transfer mispricing on developing countries is not just monetary. There is a series of moral effects as well. In the hypothetical PNG scenario, for instance, one glaring concern that arises from this manipulative business practice is the implication that the people of PNG are somehow unaware of the value of their own resources. Trade mispricing, then, alienates people from their own place, and in a manner similar to a worker’s alienation from their product. A red flag must be raised to the psychological impact of pricing discrepancies that suggest cobalt, somehow, has a lesser value within the borders of PNG than within, say, Canada or Belgium.<div class="p22_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The combination, or the intersection, of these two matters—these monetary and moral effects—is evidence that trade and transfer (mis)pricing, the crux of an MNE—are symptoms of an ongoing colonial hangover. The antidote? Establish strict and enforceable regulations so that one nation’s economic sovereignty does not come at the expense of another nation’s resource sovereignty.<div class="p23_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Tanya Rawal-Jindia is a researcher at <a href="https://www.thetricontinental.org/staff/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>.<div class="p24_25" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">This article was produced by <a href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Globetrotter</a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</div><div>=</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>=<a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://click1.e.alternet.org/bjdbqszvztdydqmmyjfzzyzmmjymvgcnbtzdfpsqfpp_hcqqvfmfzvccfmsfcfb.html?a=&b=300&c=21989&d=2">IRS abruptly stopped criminal investigation of Mar-a-Lago member accused of massive tax fraud months after Trump took office</a><p times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" font-style="font-style" italic="italic" color="color" rgb="rgb" margin="margin" padding="padding" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> William Ingraham Koch lives five blocks away from President Donald Trump’s…
no lnxIRS abruptly stopped criminal investigation of Mar-a-Lago member accused of massive tax fraud months after Trump took office IRS abruptly stopped criminal investigation of Mar-a-Lago member accused of massive tax fraud months after Trump took officewritten by David Cay Johnson June 6, 2019William Ingraham Koch lives five blocks away from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he is a member. The only one of the four billionaire Koch brothers to support Trump, Bill Koch…
David Cay JohnstonWilliam Ingraham Koch lives five blocks away from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he is a member. The only one of the four billionaire Koch brothers to support Trump, Bill Koch even hosted a Trump campaign fundraiser at his Cape Cod vacation home in August 2016. Co-chairs were asked to donate or raise $100,000 for the event; simply attending cost $2,700.

Atop the invitation to Koch’s home? Trump Finance Chairman Steven T. Mnuchin, now Treasury Secretary of the United States, whose duties include overseeing the Internal Revenue Service.
In part one of the Koch Papers, we revealed that Bill Koch has enjoyed hundreds of millions of dollars of untaxed profits from his carbon-based businesses, having shifted profits earned in the United States to a subsidiary in the Bahamas. A 2016 whistleblower complaint prompted an IRS criminal investigation, but the IRS halted all communication with the whistleblower’s attorneys shortly after Trump became president.
In part two, we’ll explore how Koch’s businesses withheld critical documents, stymying IRS auditors. We’ll also publish the contents of the June 2017 email that signaled the IRS had stopped pursuing the complaint against Koch’s businesses, five months after Trump took office.
 These documents are among nearly a thousand pages obtained by DCReport@RawStory, which we refer to as the Koch Papers.<div style="background-color: rgb(247, 248, 248);"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bAEdu4_fNJkJ:https://www.politico.eu/article/trumps-man-in-brussels-slams-out-of-touch-eu/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:bAEdu4_fNJkJ:https://www.politico.eu/article/trumps-man-in-brussels-slams-out-of-touch-eu/%2B%26cd%3D4%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwiQ5dKVt-bgAhUBUKwKHbEnAsYQIDADegQICxAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: 0px; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px;">=</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(247, 248, 248);"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bAEdu4_fNJkJ:https://www.politico.eu/article/trumps-man-in-brussels-slams-out-of-touch-eu/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:bAEdu4_fNJkJ:https://www.politico.eu/article/trumps-man-in-brussels-slams-out-of-touch-eu/%2B%26cd%3D4%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwiQ5dKVt-bgAhUBUKwKHbEnAsYQIDADegQICxAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: 0px; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px;">OMG </a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(247, 248, 248);"><a class="fl" href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bAEdu4_fNJkJ:https://www.politico.eu/article/trumps-man-in-brussels-slams-out-of-touch-eu/+&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" ping="/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search%3Fq%3Dcache:bAEdu4_fNJkJ:https://www.politico.eu/article/trumps-man-in-brussels-slams-out-of-touch-eu/%2B%26cd%3D4%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26gl%3Dus&ved=2ahUKEwiQ5dKVt-bgAhUBUKwKHbEnAsYQIDADegQICxAE" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: 0px; cursor: pointer; display: block; padding: 7px 18px;"></a><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/saudis-and-the-us-team-up-to-kill-european-union-effort-to-create-a-dirty-money-blacklist/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/saudis-and-the-us-team-up-to-kill-european-union-effort-to-create-a-dirty-money-blacklist/</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(247, 248, 248);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(247, 248, 248);"> United States and key ally Saudi Arabia saw their lobbying efforts pay off on Friday after the European Commission’s <a href="https://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-19-781_en.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">proposed dirty money blacklist</a>—which included the oil-rich kingdom and several American territories—<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-saudi-moneylaundering-idUSKCN1QI4RZ" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">fizzled</a>.<div class="p1_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The Americans fell on us like a tonne of bricks,” an anonymous Brussels official <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/3be6cb28-3c40-11e9-b72b-2c7f526ca5d0" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">told the Financial Times</a>.<div class="p2_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The effort “to protect the integrity of the E.U. financial system,” the commission said last month, included blacklisting 23 territories that <a href="https://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-19-781_en.htm" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">had</a> “strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing frameworks.” They included American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico as well as Saudi Arabia.<div class="p3_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">However, as the Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-countries-block-new-eu-dirty-money-blacklist-11551452467" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reported</a> Friday, “European governments, under pressure from Washington and Riyadh, have refused to endorse” the list.<div class="p4_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“The rejection of the governments is a farce at the expense of security,” declared Sven Giegold, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Germany, in a statement quoted by <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-28/eu-states-said-to-object-to-dirty-money-list-after-u-s-outrage" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Bloomberg</a>. “France and the U.K. want to remove Saudi Arabia and other countries from the list. Spain is protecting Panama. The United States is exerting massive pressure because four U.S. jurisdictions,” he said.<div class="p5_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">“Governments must ask themselves whether they are on the side of autocrats or their citizens!” he <a href="https://twitter.com/sven_giegold/status/1101437689314885633" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">added</a> in a tweet.<div class="p6_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">As Politico <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-countries-revolt-against-commission-dirty-money-list-vera-jourova/%20" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reported</a>, the list, which would need the backing of the European Parliament and Council of the E.U. to go into effect, “is politically sensitive because it has teeth. E.U. banks that handle payments connected to the blacklisted countries and territories would have to conduct ‘enhanced due diligence’ on any cash that moves to and from the E.U. and the blacklisted jurisdictions.”<div class="p7_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Politico also noted the “intense backlash and behind-the-scenes lobbying from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.”<div class="p8_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The proposal <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/03/01/%20https%3A//home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm610" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">drew</a> ire from the U.S. Treasury Department, which denounced the commission’s methodology, and its head, Secretary Steven Mnuchin, wrote to the commission to denounce the effort, as FT reported.<div class="p9_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, even <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20190301-us-welcomes-demise-eu-money-laundering-blacklist-plan" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">acknowledged</a> that “we had to spend our energy killing this bad idea.” Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, for his part, also wrote to E.U. leaders about the “surprising and unexpected” list, and warned of its damage to “trade and investment flows between the kingdom and the European Union.”</div><div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>=aha:offshore banks are secret vs transparency thus boost corruption, but also allow tax dodge for rich ppl and corps to park assests offshore, thus evade tax thus extraction from economy (as our country becomes de-industrialized/finanacialized) so a huge budeer untapped to stimulate economy and build infrastructure<div style="">=</div><div style=""><a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bernie-sanders-calls-international-progressive-movement-searing-op-ed">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bernie-sanders-calls-international-progressive-movement-searing-op-ed</a></div><div style="">
</div><div style="">...Bernie:</div><div style="">
</div><div style="">A new and international progressive movement must commit itself to tackling structural inequality both between and within nations," he continues. "Such a movement must overcome 'the cult of money' and 'survival of the fittest' mentalities that the pope warned against." In addition, Sanders writes, "it must support national and international policies aimed at raising standards of living for poor and working-class people—from full employment and a living wage to universal higher education, healthcare and fair trade agreements. In addition, we must rein in corporate power and prevent the environmental destruction of our planet as a result of climate change."</div>Sanders offers at least one concrete proposal. The Tax Justice Network estimates that the planet's wealthiest individuals and corporations have stashed between $21 and $32 trillion in off-share tax havens, and that by eliminating this abuse, we could end world hunger and generate hundreds of millions of jobs, among countless other possibilities. Ultimately, he believes these kinds of measures are not just the "moral thing to do" but a "strategic geopolitical imperative."...<div style=""></div> =<a href="https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/13-trump-allies-and-counting-busted-explosive-paradise-papers-leak">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/13-trump-allies-and-counting-busted-explosive-paradise-papers-leak</a>...Paradise Papers include around 13.4 million leaked documents, including nearly 7 million loan agreements, financial statements, emails, trust deeds and other paperwork from the Bermuda law firm Appleby Group Services Ltd. Appleby was named offshore firm of the year by Legal 500 UK in 2015. The law firms branches are in Bermuda, Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Mauritius and the Seychelles, and it has a presence in Hong Kong and Shanghai."The Paradise Papers reveal offshore interests and activities of more than 120 politicians and world leaders, including Queen Elizabeth II whose private estate indirectly invested in a rent-to-own loan company accused of predatory tactics. At least 13 allies, major donors and Cabinet members of U.S. President Donald Trump appear, including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s interests in a shipping company that makes millions from an energy firm whose owners include Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law and a sanctioned Russian tycoon," the press release by ICIJ <a href="https://www.icij.org/blog/2017/790/icij-releases-paradise-papers/">summarized</a>.Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said Ross had misled Congress and the Americans by concealing his ongoing stake in the company, Navigator. “Only after a thorough investigation can Americans be sure Secretary Ross really has their best interests at heart,” Blumenthal said.The leaked files from Appleby, the offshore law firm, include details of tax planning by nearly 100 multinational corporations, including Apple, Nike and Uber.The offshore industry makes “the poor poorer” and is “deepening wealth inequality,” Brooke Harrington, a certified wealth manager and Copenhagen Business School professor said, adding: “There is this small group of people who are not equally subject to the laws as the rest of us, and that’s on purpose.”These people “live the dream” of enjoying “the benefits of society without being subject to any of its constraints,” he said.The leak has prompted Canadian tax authorities to review reports linking a key fundraiser for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to offshore trusts in the Caribbean. ...According to a database compiled by The Lawyer magazine, Appleby's corporate clients include Barclays Group, Citibank, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, HSBC Bank, JPMorgan Chase, KPMG, Lloyds Banking Group, PwC, Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Santander UK and Standard Chartered.ref<a href="https://www.icij.org/blog/2017/790/icij-releases-paradise-papers/">https://www.icij.org/blog/2017/790/icij-releases-paradise-papers/</a><a href="https://www.icij.org/article/us-president-donald-trumps-influencers/">https://www.icij.org/article/us-president-donald-trumps-influencers/</a><a href="https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/donald-trumps-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-and-his-russian-business-ties/">https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/donald-trumps-commerce-secretary-wilbur-ross-and-his-russian-business-ties/</a>
=
Mossack Fonseca  panama papers

--<div style="">http://www.ecowatch.com/pulitzer-prize-storm-lake-times-2355740850.html
<div>In addition, an international collaboration between McClatchy, the Miami Herald and the International Consortion of Investigative Journalists that resulted in the landmark <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/tag/panama-papers" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; word-wrap: break-word;">Panama Papers</a> investigation into offshore tax havens was awarded the prize for Explanatory Reporting.The Guardian listed [no linl] the wide-ranging ramifications of the revelations contained in the Panama Papers:Iceland's prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson was<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/05/iceland-prime-minister-resigns-over-panama-papers-revelations" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; word-wrap: break-word;"> forced to quit</a> after it emerged that his family had sheltered cash offshore. There were demonstrations in Argentina and a small war in Azerbaijan, initiated—some believed—to distract from revelations concerning the president and his daughters.In China, censors blocked the words "Panama Papers" and jammed the website of the Guardian. In Russia, aides to Vladimir Putin fumed about a western "spy" conspiracy after it emerged that Putin's oldest friend, the cellist Sergei Roldugin, had <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/sergei-roldugin-the-cellist-who-holds-the-key-to-tracing-putins-hidden-fortune" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; word-wrap: break-word;">about $2bn flowing into a network of British Virgin Islands companies</a>.The founders of the Panamanian law firm, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/10/panama-papers-mossack-fonseca-offices-raided-over-odebrecht-bribery-scandal" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; word-wrap: break-word;">Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca</a>, were arrested in February. They are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/11/panama-papers-mossack-fonseca-fonders-refused-bail" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; word-wrap: break-word;">currently in jail</a> on suspicion of money laundering following a coordinated swoop by prosecutors across Latin America.<div>
</div>=</div></div>apple tax ireland EUWith James S. Henry, senior advisor to the Tax Justice Network, a global justice fellow at Yale, a senior fellow at the Columbia University Center for Sustainable investment and former chief economist of McKinsey and Company.Henry‘s books include The Blood Bankers: Tales from the Global Underground Economy and The Pirate Bankers.
<a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-september-1-2016/">https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-september-1-2016/</a>nicholas schaxton treasure island
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:Tax_Havens_and_the_Men_who_Stole_the_World">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:Tax_Havens_and_the_Men_who_Stole_the_World</a>
<a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-18-2016/">https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-april-18-2016/</a>
=http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/6/panama_papers_could_pirate_party_co
Iceland’s Pirate Party has seen a surge of support following the

publication of the Panama Papers, which led to the resignation of the

country’s prime minister.

Leaked documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca

revealed that Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson owned an offshore company

with his wife, which he failed to declare when he entered Parliament. He

is accused of concealing millions of dollars’ worth of family assets.

We speak to the group’s co-founder, former WikiLeaks volunteer Birgitta

Jónsdóttir, who is now a member of the Icelandic Parliament.
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/world/6-things-you-need-know-about-bombshell-panama-papers-leak" style="text-decoration: none; outline: none;">http://www.alternet.org/world/6-things-you-need-know-about-bombshell-panama-papers-leak</a>6 Things You Need to Know About the Bombshell 'Panama Papers' LeakAn anonymous whistleblower unloads massive trove of files exposing how world leaders and other elites hide money and evade taxes.By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet April 4, 2016
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other media partners dropped the explosive “Panama Papers” leak on Sunday. 
The trove is described by ICIJ, a global network of investigative journalists, as “11.5 million leaked files to expose the offshore holdings of world political leaders, links to global scandals and details of the hidden financial dealings of fraudsters, drug traffickers, billionaires, celebrities, sports stars and more.”
Mossack Fonseca, the Panama-based law firm that was exposed, has allegedly helped wealthy and powerful people hide and launder money, evading billions in taxes. The firm has “offices in more than 35 locations around the globe, and is one of the world’s top creators of shell companies, corporate structures that can be used to hide ownership of assets,” according to ICIJ. The papers together reveal information about more than 214,000 offshore companies connected to individuals in more than 200 countries and territories.
Here are six things you should know about the massive revelation:
1. This could be the biggest leak ever. The massive scale of the Panama Papers revelations is best captured in the following image, which was produced by Süddeutsche Zeitung.2. This is the work of a courageous whistleblower. The following Twitter shout-out from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to the “John Doe” behind the Panama Papers says it all.

3. Whether or not the actions exposed in the Panama Papers were legal is not the most important question.
As journalists continue to pore over the trove of documents, many questions are centering on whether governments and corporations can be tied to illegal behavior. However, as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias argued on Sunday, the documents also offer “the most granular look ever at a banal reality that's long been hiding in plain sight. Even as the world's wealthiest and most powerful nations have engaged in increasingly complex and intensive efforts at international cooperation to smooth the wheels of global commerce, they have willfully chosen to allow the wealthiest members of Western society to shield their financial assets from taxation (and in many cases divorce or bankruptcy settlement) by taking advantage of shell companies and tax havens.”
Pivoting off of Yglesias’ observations, journalist Glenn Greenwald persuasively argued, “Proving that certain behavior is ‘legal’ does not prove that it is ethical or just. That’s because corrupted political systems, by definition, often protect and legalize exactly the behavior that is most unjust. Vital journalism does not only expose law-breaking. It also highlights how corrupted political and legal systems can be co-opted by the most powerful in order to legally sanction atrocious and destructive behavior that serves their interests, typically with little or no public awareness that it’s been done.”
4. A LOT of famous and powerful people are linked to the revelations. Here are just some of the world leaders whose family members and close associates are alleged to have been implicated—or have been directly tied themselves: British Prime Minister David Cameron, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Saudi Arabian King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, South African President Jacob Zuma, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
5. There is a conspicuous lack of U.S. players named in the initial reporting. Adam Johnson, a contributing writer for AlterNet and FAIR, pointed out this absence on social media:[but more to come]=ASHINGTON — The hedge fund magnates Daniel S. Loeb, Louis Moore Bacon and Steven A. Cohen have much in common. They have managed billions of dollars in capital, earning vast fortunes. They have invested large sums in art — and millions more in political candidates.<div class="region region-content" style="line-height: 32px;"><div id="block-system-main" class="block block-system first last odd count-1" style="position: relative;"><div class="content" style="">
Moreover, each has exploited an esoteric tax loophole that saved them millions in taxes. The trick? Route the money to Bermuda and back.
With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the “income defense industry,” consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means.


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In recent years, this apparatus has become one of the most powerful avenues of influence for wealthy Americans of all political stripes, including Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen, who give heavily to Republicans, and the liberal billionaire George Soros, who has called for higher levies on the rich while at the same time using tax loopholes to bolster his own fortune.
All are among a small group providing much of the early cash for the 2016 presidential campaign.
Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service — the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans.
The impact on their own fortunes has been stark. Two decades ago, when Bill Clinton was elected president, the 400 highest-earning taxpayers in America paid nearly 27 percent of their income in federal taxes, according to I.R.S. data. By 2012, when President Obama was re-elected, that figure had fallen to less than 17 percent, which is just slightly more than the typical family making $100,000 annually, when payroll taxes are included for both groups.
The ultra-wealthy “literally pay millions of dollars for these services,” said Jeffrey A. Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies economic elites, “and save in the tens or hundreds of millions in taxes.”
Some of the biggest current tax battles are being waged by some of the most generous supporters of 2016 candidates. They include the families of the hedge fund investors Robert Mercer, who gives to Republicans, and James Simons, who gives to Democrats; as well as the options trader Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian-leaning donor to Republicans.
Mr. Yass’s firm is litigating what the agency deemed to be tens of millions of dollars in underpaid taxes. Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund Mr. Simons founded and which Mr. Mercer helps run, is currently under review by the I.R.S. over a loophole that saved their fund an estimated $6.8 billion in taxes over roughly a decade, according to a Senate investigation. Some of these same families have also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to conservative groups that have attacked virtually any effort to raises taxes on the wealthy.

For the Richest, Lower TaxesThe average tax rate for the ultra-wealthy has fallen dramatically.
Income Tax Rate%201001995200020052012Top 400 earners
Note: 2012 is the last year for which final data is available. 

In the heat of the presidential race, the influence of wealthy donors is being tested. At stake is the Obama administration’s 2013 tax increase on high earners — the first substantial increase in two decades — and an I.R.S. initiative to ensure that, in effect, the higher rates stick by cracking down on tax avoidance by the wealthy.
While Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have pledged to raise taxes on these voters, virtually every Republican has advanced policies that would vastly reduce their tax bills, sometimes to as little as 10 percent of their income.
At the same time, most Republican candidates favor eliminating the inheritance tax, a move that would allow the new rich, and the old, to bequeath their fortunes intact, solidifying the wealth gap far into the future. And several have proposed a substantial reduction — or even elimination — in the already deeply discounted tax rates on investment gains, a foundation of the most lucrative tax strategies.
“There’s this notion that the wealthy use their money to buy politicians; more accurately, it’s that they can buy policy, and specifically, tax policy,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who served as chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “That’s why these egregious loopholes exist, and why it’s so hard to close them.”
The Family Office
Each of the top 400 earners took home, on average, about $336 million in 2012, the latest year for which data is available. If the bulk of that money had been paid out as salary or wages, as it is for the typical American, the tax obligations of those wealthy taxpayers could have more than doubled.
Instead, much of their income came from convoluted partnerships and high-end investment funds. Other earnings accrued in opaque family trusts and foreign shell corporations, beyond the reach of the tax authorities.
The well-paid technicians who devise these arrangements toil away at white-shoe law firms and elite investment banks, as well as a variety of obscure boutiques. But at the fulcrum of the strategizing over how to minimize taxes are so-called family offices, the customized wealth management departments of Americans with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in assets.
Family offices have existed since the late 19th century, when the Rockefellers pioneered the institution, and gained popularity in the 1980s. But they have proliferated rapidly over the last decade, as the ranks of the super-rich, and the size of their fortunes, swelled to record proportions.
“We have so much wealth being created, significant wealth, that it creates a need for the family office structure now,” said Sree Arimilli, an industry recruiting consultant.
Family offices, many of which are dedicated to managing and protecting the wealth of a single family, oversee everything from investment strategy to philanthropy. But tax planning is a core function. While the specific techniques these advisers employ to minimize taxes can be mind-numbingly complex, they generally follow a few simple principles, like converting one type of income into another type that’s taxed at a lower rate.


Mr. Loeb, for example, has invested in a Bermuda-based reinsurer — an insurer to insurance companies — that turns around and invests the money in his hedge fund. That maneuver transforms his profits from short-term bets in the market, which the government taxes at roughly 40 percent, into long-term profits, known as capital gains, which are taxed at roughly half that rate. It has had the added advantage of letting Mr. Loeb defer taxes on this income indefinitely, allowing his wealth to compound and grow more quickly.
The Bermuda insurer Mr. Loeb helped set up went public in 2013 and is active in the insurance business, not merely a tax dodge. Mr. Cohen and Mr. Bacon abandoned similar insurance-based strategies in recent years. “Our investment in Max Re was not a tax-driven scheme, but rather a sound investment response to investor interest in a more dynamically managed portfolio akin to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway,” said Mr. Bacon, who leads Moore Capital Management. “Hedge funds were a minority of the investment portfolio, and Moore Capital’s products a much smaller subset of this alternative portfolio.” Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen declined to comment.
Photo
Louis Moore Bacon, shown with his wife, Gabrielle, is the founder of a highly successful hedge fund and a leading contributor to Jeb Bush’s super PAC. Among his homes is one on Robins Island, off Long Island. Credit Left: Amanda Gordon/Bloomberg News, via Getty ImagesOrganizing one’s business as a partnership can be lucrative in its own right. Some of the partnerships from which the wealthy derive their income are allowed to sell shares to the public, making it easy to cash out a chunk of the business while retaining control. But unlike publicly traded corporations, they pay no corporate income tax; the partners pay taxes as individuals. And the income taxes are often reduced by large deductions, such as for depreciation.
For large private partnerships, meanwhile, the I.R.S. often struggles “to determine whether a tax shelter exists, an abusive tax transaction is being used,” according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office. The agency is not allowed to collect underpaid taxes directly from these partnerships, even those with several hundred partners. Instead, it must collect from each individual partner, requiring the agency to commit significant time and manpower.
The wealthy can also avail themselves of a range of esoteric and customized tax deductions that go far beyond writing off a home office or dinner with a client. One aggressive strategy is to place income in a type of charitable trust, generating a deduction that offsets the income tax. The trust then purchases what’s known as a private placement life insurance policy, which invests the money on a tax-free basis, frequently in a number of hedge funds. The person’s heirs can inherit, also tax-free, whatever money is left after the trust pays out a percentage each year to charity, often a considerable sum.
Many of these maneuvers are well established, and wealthy taxpayers say they are well within their rights to exploit them. Others exist in a legal gray area, its boundaries defined by the willingness of taxpayers to defend their strategies against the I.R.S. Almost all are outside the price range of the average taxpayer.


Among tax lawyers and accountants, “the best and brightest get a high from figuring out how to do tricky little deals,” said Karen L. Hawkins, who until recently headed the I.R.S. office that oversees tax practitioners. “Frankly, it is almost beyond the intellectual and resource capacity of the Internal Revenue Service to catch.”
The combination of cost and complexity has had a profound effect, tax experts said. Whatever tax rates Congress sets, the actual rates paid by the ultra-wealthy tend to fall over time as they exploit their numerous advantages.
From Mr. Obama’s inauguration through the end of 2012, federal income tax rates on individuals did not change (excluding payroll taxes). But the highest-earning one-thousandth of Americans went from paying an average of 20.9 percent to 17.6 percent. By contrast, the top 1 percent, excluding the very wealthy, went from paying just under 24 percent on average to just over that level.
“We do have two different tax systems, one for normal wage-earners and another for those who can afford sophisticated tax advice,” said Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego who studies the intersection of tax policy and inequality. “At the very top of the income distribution, the effective rate of tax goes down, contrary to the principles of a progressive income tax system.”
A Very Quiet Defense
Having helped foster an alternative tax system, wealthy Americans have been aggressive in defending it.
Trade groups representing the Bermuda-based insurance company Mr. Loeb helped set up, for example, have spent the last several months pleading with the I.R.S. that its proposed rules tightening the hedge fund insurance loophole are too onerous.
The major industry group representing private equity funds spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year lobbying on such issues as “carried interest,” the granddaddy of Wall Street tax loopholes, which makes it possible for fund managers to pay the capital gains rate rather than the higher standard tax rate on a substantial share of their income for running the fund.
The budget deal that Congress approved in October allows the I.R.S. to collect underpaid taxes from large partnerships at the firm level for the first time — which is far easier for the agency — thanks to a provision that lawmakers slipped into the deal at the last minute, before many lobbyists could mobilize. But the new rules are relatively weak — firms can still choose to have partners pay the taxes — and don’t take effect until 2018, giving the wealthy plenty of time to weaken them further.
Shortly after the provision passed, the Managed Funds Association, an industry group that represents prominent hedge funds like D. E. Shaw, Renaissance Technologies, Tiger Management and Third Point, began meeting with members of Congress to discuss a wish list of adjustments. The founders of these funds have all donated at least $500,000 to 2016 presidential candidates. During the Obama presidency, the association itself has risen to become one of the most powerful trade groups in Washington, spending over $4 million a year on lobbying.
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And while the lobbying clout of the wealthy is most often deployed through industry trade associations and lawyers, some rich families have locked arms to advance their interests more directly.
The inheritance tax has been a primary target. In the early 1990s, a California family office executive named Patricia Soldano began lobbying on behalf of wealthy families to repeal the tax, which would not only save them money, but also make it easier to preserve their business empires from one generation to the next. The idea struck many hardened operatives as unrealistic at the time, given that the tax affected only the wealthiest Americans. But Ms. Soldano’s efforts — funded in part by the Mars and Koch families — laid the groundwork for a one-year elimination in 2010.
The tax has been restored, but currently applies only to couples leaving roughly $11 million or more to their heirs, up from those leaving more than $1.2 million when Ms. Soldano started her campaign. It affected fewer than 5,200 families last year.
“If anyone would have told me we’d be where we are today, I would never have guessed it,” Ms. Soldano said in an interview.
Some of the most profound victories are barely known outside the insular world of the wealthy and their financial managers.
In 2009, Congress set out to require that investment partnerships like hedge funds register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, partly so that regulators would have a better grasp on the risks they posed to the financial system.

The early legislative language would have required single-family offices to register as well, exposing the highly secretive institutions to scrutiny that their clients were eager to avoid. Some of the I.R.S.’s cases against the wealthy originate with tips from the S.E.C., which is often better positioned to spot tax evasion.
By the summer of 2009, several family office executives had formed a lobbying group called the Private Investor Coalition to push back against the proposal. The coalition won an exemption in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, then spent much of the next year persuading the S.E.C. to largely adopt its preferred definition of “family office.”
So expansive was the resulting loophole that Mr. Soros’s $24.5 billion hedge fund took advantage of it, converting to a family office after returning capital to its remaining outside investors. The hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller, a former business partner of Mr. Soros, took the same step.
The Soros family, which generally supports Democrats, has committed at least $1 million to the 2016 presidential campaign; Mr. Druckenmiller, who favors Republicans, has put slightly more than $300,000 behind three different G.O.P. presidential candidates.
A slide presentation from the Private Investor Coalition’s 2013 annual meeting credited the success to multiple meetings with members of the Senate Banking Committee, the House Financial Services Committee, congressional staff and S.E.C. staff. “All with a low profile,” the document noted. “We got most of what we wanted AND a few extras we didn’t request.”


A Hobbled Monitor
After all the loopholes and all the lobbying, what remains of the government’s ability to collect taxes from the wealthy runs up against one final hurdle: the crisis facing the I.R.S.
President Obama has made fighting tax evasion by the rich a priority. In 2010, he signed legislation making it easier to identify Americans who squirreled away assets in Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Islands shelters.
His I.R.S. convened a Global High Wealth Industry Group, known colloquially as “the wealth squad,” to scrutinize the returns of Americans with incomes of at least $10 million a year.
But while these measures have helped the government retrieve billions, the agency’s efforts have flagged in the face of scandal, political pressure and budget cuts. Between 2010, the year before Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and 2014, the I.R.S. budget dropped by almost $2 billion in real terms, or nearly 15 percent. That has forced it to shed about 5,000 high-level enforcement positions out of about 23,000, according to the agency.
Audit rates for the $10 million-plus club spiked in the first few years of the Global High Wealth program, but have plummeted since then.

Steven A. Cohen, shown with his wife, Alexandra, is the founder of SAC Capital and owns a home in East Hampton. He is a prominent art collector and has focused his political contributions on a super PAC for Gov. Chris Christie. Credit Left: Carly Erickson/BFA; Right: Doug Kuntz for The New York TimesThe political challenge for the agency became especially acute in 2013, after the agency acknowledged singling out conservative nonprofits in a review of political activity by tax-exempt groups. (Senior officials left the agency as a result of the controversy.)
Several former I.R.S. officials, including Marcus Owens, who once headed the agency’s Exempt Organizations division, said the controversy badly damaged the agency’s willingness to investigate other taxpayers, even outside the exempt division.
“I.R.S. enforcement is either absent or diminished” in certain areas, he said. Mr. Owens added that his former department — which provides some oversight of money used by charities and nonprofits — has been decimated.
Groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform, which are financed partly by the foundations of wealthy families and large businesses, have called for impeaching the I.R.S. commissioner. They are bolstered by deep-pocketed advocacy groups like the Club for Growth, which has aided primary challenges against Republicans who have voted in favor of higher taxes.
In 2014, the Club for Growth Action fund raised more than $9 million and spent much of it helping candidates critical of the I.R.S. Roughly 60 percent of the money raised by the fund came from just 12 donors, including Mr. Mercer, who has given the group $2 million in the last five years. Mr. Mercer and his immediate family have also donated more than $11 million to several super PACs supporting Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, an outspoken I.R.S. critic and a presidential candidate.
Another prominent donor is Mr. Yass, who helps run a trading firm called the Susquehanna International Group. He donated $100,000 to the Club for Growth Action fund in September. Mr. Yass serves on the board of the libertarian Cato Institute and, like Mr. Mercer, appears to subscribe to limited-government views that partly motivate his political spending.


But he may also have more than a passing interest in creating a political environment that undermines the I.R.S. Susquehanna is currently challenging a proposed I.R.S. determination that an affiliate of the firm effectively repatriated more than $375 million in income from subsidiaries located in Ireland and the Cayman Islands in 2007, creating a large tax liability. (The affiliate brought the money back to the United States in later years and paid dividend taxes on it; the I.R.S. asserts that it should have paid the ordinary income tax rate, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars more.)
In June, Mr. Yass donated more than $2 million to three super PACs aligned with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has called for taxing all income at a flat rate of 14.5 percent. That change in itself would save wealthy supporters like Mr. Yass millions of dollars.

Mr. Paul, also a presidential candididate, has suggested going even further, calling the I.R.S. a “rogue agency” and circulating a petition in 2013 calling for the tax equivalent of regime change. “Be it now therefore resolved,” the petition reads, “that we, the undersigned, demand the immediate abolishment of the Internal Revenue Service.”
But even if that campaign is a long shot, the richest taxpayers will continue to enjoy advantages over everyone else.
For the ultra-wealthy, “our tax code is like a leaky barrel,” said J. Todd Metcalf, the Democrats’ chief tax counsel on the Senate Finance Committee. ”Unless you plug every hole or get a new barrel, it’s going to leak out.”
Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting and Kitty Bennett contributed research.---<div style="">---pfizer NJ allergan scam irish allergan tax haven, allready offshores profits; 40 min david k johnston syracuse law aljazeera am<a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-november-25-2015/">https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-november-25-2015/</a>apple test congr "stateless income"2004 b 43 save 11b$ in taxes Ensign Am Jobs Actsingle line of tax code signed into law by RR; keep taxes while techinvally offshore, but they can do whatever they want incl reinvest it in US, but make more off compund interest than tax, so bassically make $ on taxes
duopoly can be  worse than mono; mkt power, raise prices 1b$ per WEEK of we could negotiate (Vets Admin can)3 airlines plus SW; </div><div style="">
<div style="">Bahamas hides what? also Dominican Rep.</div><div style="">
</div><div style="">bksh:</div><div style=""><div>It certainly is good for business. The partners charge six-figure fees to lobby and six-figure fees to manage election campaigns. As a result, they take home six-figure salaries. (Their stated aim is to make $450,000 apiece each year; they are assumed to have achieved it last year.) They unabashedly peddle their access to the Reagan Administration. The firm's proposal soliciting the Bahamas as a client, for instance, touted the "personal relationships between State Department officials and Black, Manafort & Stone" that could be "utilized to upgrade a backchannel relationship in the economic and foreign policy spheres."</div><div>
</div><div>Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,960803,00.html#ixzz0sZQya1Ei</div></div><div style="">
<div style="">wiki tax haven:</div><div style="">
</div><div style=""><h2 style="margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Extent[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tax_haven&action=edit&section=3" title="Edit section: Extent" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><table class="wikitable" style="margin: 0px 0px 1em 1em; border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); border-collapse: collapse; float: right; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249);"><caption>Global distribution
of net financial assets<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-17" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[17]</a></caption><tbody><tr><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em; text-align: center; background-color: rgb(242, 242, 242);">Individuals with
financial assets</th><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em; text-align: center; background-color: rgb(242, 242, 242);">Total liquid net
worth ($Tr.)</th><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em; text-align: center; background-color: rgb(242, 242, 242);">Amount of which
offshore ($Tr.)</th></tr><tr><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="left">> $30MM</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$16.7</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$9.8</td></tr><tr><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="left">$5 – $30MM</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$10.7</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$5.1</td></tr><tr><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="left">$1 – $5MM</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$17.4</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$4.7</td></tr><tr><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="left">All > $1MM</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$44.8</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$19.6</td></tr><tr><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="left">Rest < $1MM</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$10.3</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$1.0</td></tr><tr><th style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em; text-align: center; background-color: rgb(242, 242, 242);">
</th><td colspan="2" style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em; text-align: right;">
</td></tr><tr><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="left">Total</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$55.1</td><td style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 0.2em;" align="center">$20.6</td></tr></tbody></table><h3 style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 1.6; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Capital held offshore[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tax_haven&action=edit&section=4" title="Edit section: Capital held offshore" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>While incomplete, and with the limitations discussed below, the available statistics nonetheless indicate that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_banking" title="Offshore banking" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">offshore banking</a> is a very sizable activity. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_for_Economic_Co-operation_and_Development" title="Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">OECD</a>estimated in 2007 that capital held offshore amounted to between $5 trillion and $7 trillion, making up approximately 6–8% of total global investments under management.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-Places_in_the_sun-18" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[18]</a> The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Justice_Network" title="Tax Justice Network" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Tax Justice Network</a> (an anti-tax haven pressure group) estimated more recently in 2012 that capital held offshore amounted to between $21 trillion and $32 trillion (between 24-32% of total global investments).<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-TOI-19" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[19]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-Reuters-20" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[20]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-BBC-21" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[21]</a>In 2000, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund" title="International Monetary Fund" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">International Monetary Fund</a> calculated based on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlements" title="Bank for International Settlements" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Bank for International Settlements</a> data that for selected <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_financial_centre" title="Offshore financial centre" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">offshore financial centres</a>, on-<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_sheet" title="Balance sheet" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">balance sheet</a> cross-border assets held in offshore financial centres reached a level of $4.6 trillion at the end of June 1999 (about 50 percent of total cross-border assets). Of that $4.6 trillion, $0.9 trillion was held in the Caribbean, $1 trillion in Asia, and most of the remaining $2.7 trillion accounted for by the major <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Finance_Centre" title="International Finance Centre" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">International Finance Centres</a> (IFCs), namely London, the U.S. IBFs, and the Japanese offshore market.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-22" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[22]</a> The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.Department_of_Treasury" title="U.S. Department of Treasury" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">U.S. Department of Treasury</a> estimated that in 2011 the Caribbean Banking Centers, which include Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles and Panama, held almost $2 trillion dollars in United States debt.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-23" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[23]</a> Of this, approximately US$1.4 trillion is estimated to be held in the Cayman Islands alone.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-Places_in_the_sun-18" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[18]</a>The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Journal" title="Wall Street Journal" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Wall Street Journal</a> in a study of 60 large U.S. companies found that they deposited $166 billion in offshore accounts in 2012, sheltering over 40% of their profits from U.S. taxes.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-ThurmLinebaugh-12" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[12]</a> Similarly, Desai, Foley and Hines in the Journal of Public Economics found that: "in 1999, 59% of U.S. firms with significant foreign operations had affiliates in tax haven countries", although they did not define "significant" for this purpose.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-24" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[24]</a> In 2009, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Office" title="Government Accountability Office" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Government Accountability Office</a> (GAO) reported that 83 of the 100 largest U.S. publicly traded corporations and 63 of the 100 largest contractors for the U.S. federal government were maintaining subsidiaries in countries generally considered havens for avoiding taxes. The GAO did not review the companies' transactions to independently verify that the subsidiaries helped the companies reduce their tax burden, but said only that historically the purpose of such subsidiaries is to cut tax costs.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-25" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[25]</a>James Henry, former chief economist at consultants <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey%26_Company" title="McKinsey & Company" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">McKinsey & Company</a>, in his report for the Tax Justice Network gives an indication of the amount of money that is sheltered by wealthy individuals in tax havens. The report estimated conservatively that a fortune of $21 trillion is stashed away in off-shore accounts with $9.8 trillion alone by the top tier—less than 100,000 people—who each own financial assets of $30 million or more. The report's author indicated that this hidden money results in a “huge” lost tax revenue—a "black hole" in the economy—and many countries would become creditors instead of being debtors if the money of their tax evaders would be taxed.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-TOI-19" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[19]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-Reuters-20" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[20]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-BBC-21" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[21]</a><h3 style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 1.6; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Lost tax revenue[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tax_haven&action=edit&section=5" title="Edit section: Lost tax revenue" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>The Tax Justice Network estimated that global tax revenue lost in 2012 to tax havens is between USD $190 billion and $255 billion per year, assuming a 3% <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains" title="Capital gains" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">capital gains</a> rate, a 30% <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax" title="Capital gains tax" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">capital gains tax</a> rate, and $21 trillion to $32 trillion hidden in tax havens worldwide.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-tjn12-8" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[8]</a> If such hidden offshore assets are considered, many countries with governments nominally in debt are shown to be net creditor nations.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-cbc12-9" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[9]</a> However, the tax policy director of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_Institute_of_Taxation" title="Chartered Institute of Taxation" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Chartered Institute of Taxation</a> expressed skepticism over the accuracy of the figures.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-bbc.co.uk-11" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[11]</a> If true, those sums would amount to approximately 5 to 8 times the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation(currency)" title="Circulation (currency)" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">total amount of currency presently in circulation</a> in the world. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J.Mitchell" title="Daniel J. Mitchell" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Daniel J. Mitchell</a> of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute" title="Cato Institute" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Cato Institute</a> says that the report also assumes, when considering notional lost tax revenue, that 100% money deposited offshore is evading payment of tax.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-26" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[26]</a>In October 2009, research commissioned from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deloitte_Touche_Tohmatsu" title="Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Deloitte</a> for the Foot Review of British Offshore Financial Centres (London is a tax haven for much of Europe, Asia, and South America, it should be noted) said that much less tax had been lost to tax havens than previously had been thought. The report indicated "We estimate the total UK corporation tax potentially lost to avoidance activities to be up to £2 billion per annum, although it could be much lower." An earlier report by the U.K. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trades_Union_Congress" title="Trades Union Congress" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Trades Union Congress</a>, concluded that tax avoidance by the 50 largest companies in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTSE_100_Index" title="FTSE 100 Index" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">FTSE 100</a> was depriving the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Treasury" title="UK Treasury" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">UK Treasury</a> of approximately £11.8 billion.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-The_Times-27" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[27]</a> The report also stressed that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Crown_Dependencies" title="British Crown Dependencies" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">British Crown Dependencies</a> make a "significant contribution to the liquidity of the UK market". In the second quarter of 2009, they provided net funds to banks in the UK totalling $323 billion (£195 billion), of which $218 billion came from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey" title="Jersey" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Jersey</a>, $74 billion from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernsey" title="Guernsey" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Guernsey</a> and $40 billion from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Man" title="Isle of Man" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Isle of Man</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-The_Times-27" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[27]</a>The Tax Justice Network reports that this system of tax evasion is “basically designed and operated” by a group of highly paid specialists from the world’s largest private banks (led by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS" title="UBS" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">UBS</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_Suisse" title="Credit Suisse" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Credit Suisse</a>, and<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs" title="Goldman Sachs" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Goldman Sachs</a>), law offices, and accounting firms and tolerated by international organizations such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlements" title="Bank for International Settlements" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Bank for International Settlements</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Monetary_Fund" title="International Monetary Fund" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">International Monetary Fund</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Bank" title="World Bank" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">World Bank</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD" title="OECD" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">OECD</a>, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G20" title="G20" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">G20</a>. The amount of money hidden away has significantly increased since 2005, sharpening the divide between the super-rich and the rest of the world.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-TOI-19" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[19]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-Reuters-20" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[20]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-BBC-21" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[21]</a><h2 style="margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Examples[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tax_haven&action=edit&section=6" title="Edit section: Examples" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><div class="hatnote boilerplate seealso" style="font-style: italic; padding-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; line-height: 22.4px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">See also: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_financial_centres" title="List of offshore financial centres" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">List of offshore financial centres</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world" title="Tax rates around the world" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Tax rates around the world</a></div>The U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research has suggested that roughly 15% of the countries in the world are tax havens, that these countries tend to be small and affluent, and that better governed and regulated countries are more likely to become tax havens, and are more likely to be successful if they become tax havens.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-28" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[28]</a><ul style="line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaanaqmaaabb8jblaaaablbmvex="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX" auow5qsojaaaaaxrstlmaqobyzgaaabnjrefucb1jyeabbqw="AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw" wlcagqeagpidyt0ivcsaaaaasuvork5cyii="); color: rgb(37, 37, 37); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switzerland" title="Switzerland" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Switzerland</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourg" title="Luxembourg" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Luxembourg</a>—primarily a conduit tax haven<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-Kevin_S_2009-29" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[29]</a></li></ul>Other sovereign countries that have such low tax rates and lax regulation that they can be considered semi-tax havens are:<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-30" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[30]</a><ul style="line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaanaqmaaabb8jblaaaablbmvex="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX" auow5qsojaaaaaxrstlmaqobyzgaaabnjrefucb1jyeabbqw="AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw" wlcagqeagpidyt0ivcsaaaaasuvork5cyii="); color: rgb(37, 37, 37); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ireland" title="Republic of Ireland" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Ireland</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-31" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[31]</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands" title="Netherlands" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Netherlands</a>—primarily a conduit tax haven<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-Kevin_S_2009-29" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[29]</a></li></ul>Non-sovereign jurisdictions commonly labelled as tax havens include:<ul style="line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaanaqmaaabb8jblaaaablbmvex="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX" auow5qsojaaaaaxrstlmaqobyzgaaabnjrefucb1jyeabbqw="AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw" wlcagqeagpidyt0ivcsaaaaasuvork5cyii="); color: rgb(37, 37, 37); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey" title="Jersey" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Jersey</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-32" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[32]</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Man" title="Isle of Man" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Isle of Man</a></li></ul><ul style="line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaanaqmaaabb8jblaaaablbmvex="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX" auow5qsojaaaaaxrstlmaqobyzgaaabnjrefucb1jyeabbqw="AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw" wlcagqeagpidyt0ivcsaaaaasuvork5cyii="); color: rgb(37, 37, 37); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Overseas_Territory" title="British Overseas Territory" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">British Overseas Territory</a><ul style="line-height: 1.6; list-style-type: disc; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX///8AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw/wLCAgQEAGpIDyT0IVcsAAAAASUVORK5CYII=);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda" title="Bermuda" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Bermuda</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-33" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[33]</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Virgin_Islands" title="British Virgin Islands" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">British Virgin Islands</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-34" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[34]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-35" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[35]</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayman_Islands" title="Cayman Islands" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Cayman Islands</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-36" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[36]</a></li></ul></li></ul><ul style="line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(" data:image="data:image" png="png" base64="base64" ivborw0kggoaaaansuheugaaaauaaaanaqmaaabb8jblaaaablbmvex="iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX" auow5qsojaaaaaxrstlmaqobyzgaaabnjrefucb1jyeabbqw="AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw" wlcagqeagpidyt0ivcsaaaaasuvork5cyii="); color: rgb(37, 37, 37); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" xmlns:data="data"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware" title="Delaware" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Delaware, United States</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-37" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[37]</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico" title="Puerto Rico" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Puerto Rico</a> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States" title="United States" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">United States</a>)<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-38" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[38]</a></li></ul>Some tax havens including some of the ones listed above do charge income tax as well as other taxes such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_taxes" title="Capital gains taxes" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">capital gains tax</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_tax" title="Inheritance tax" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">inheritance tax</a>, and so forth. Criteria distinguishing a taxpayer from a non-taxpayer can include citizenship and residency and source of income. For example, in the United States foreign nonresidents are not charged various taxes<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-39" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[39]</a> including income tax on interest on U.S. bank deposits by income tax; since the Clinton administration the IRS has proposed collecting information on these depositors to share with their home countries as a regulation; these regulations were eventually finalized in April 2012.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-40" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[40]</a>In September 2013 British Prime Minister <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cameron" title="David Cameron" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">David Cameron</a> said "I do not think it is fair any longer to refer to any of the Overseas Territories or Crown Dependencies as tax havens. They have taken action to make sure that they have fair and open tax systems. It is very important that our focus should now shift to those territories and countries that really are tax havens."<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-41" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[41]</a> Mr Cameron's comments were interpreted as a direct reference to Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, and followed a period of negotiations with those (and other) British territories during which those jurisdictions had made a number of concessions relating to tax transparency and sharing of information.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-42" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[42]</a> Anti-tax haven pressure groups immediately accused the Prime Minister of taking leave of his senses, and commenting sarcastically "It was Cameron's father's tax haven activities that are repotted [sic] to have paid for his Eton education. Was it ever realistic to think he'd change his spots?".<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#cite_note-43" style="text-decoration: none; white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[43]</a></div><div style=""></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>