Leaked "Panama Papers" reveal tax dodging

How Governments are losing billions in tax revenues

1 - 3 of 3 posts

robert99 Sweden • Posts: 1360

1 4 Apr 2016

Why is this a scandal? This is money that should go as tax revenue to pensioners, health care, unemployed, anyone that gets Government payments or to fund state infrastructures like roads and hospitals. The rich would rather keep the money. As Steve Eisman said in the Big Short it's, "F*@k the poor!"
https://www.icij.org/
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-panama-papers
On Sunday evening the Guardian and a series of other media organisations around the world published the first revelations from the Panama Papers – the biggest leak of secret information in history.

The 11m documents come from the files of Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, and help show how the politically powerful and the rich are able to exploit secret offshore tax regimes.

Using offshore companies to save tax has been condemned by many governments and can often be illegal. However, in other cases it can be permitted. Mossack Fonseca says it complies with anti-money-laundering laws and carries out thorough due diligence on all its clients. It has acted “without reproach” for 40 years, it says.

The papers were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with other media organisations, including the Guardian and the BBC.

see also
http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/panama-papers-ato-investigating-more-than-800-australian-clients-of-mossack-fonseca-20160403-gnxgu8.html
More background from 2014 at http://www.vice.com/read/evil-llc-0000524-v21n12

Companies got exposed for the same thing in the leaked documents from PWC (http://www.pwc.com/) in 2014
see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/05/luxembourg-tax-haven_n_6094544.html
and http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/leak-reveals-future-fund-and-multinationals-secret-offshore-tax-deals-20141106-11hrf5.html

robert99 Sweden • Posts: 1360

2 4 Apr 2016

Why do these people have offices in such out of the way places as Wyoming and South Dakota? The World’s Favorite New Tax Haven Is the United States

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-03/mossack-fonseca-nazi-cia-and-nevada-connections-and-why-its-now-rothschilds-turn

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/the-world-s-favorite-new-tax-haven-is-the-united-states

After years of lambasting other countries for helping rich Americans hide their money offshore, the U.S. is emerging as a leading tax and secrecy haven for rich foreigners. By resisting new global disclosure standards, the U.S. is creating a hot new market, becoming the go-to place to stash foreign wealth. Everyone from London lawyers to Swiss trust companies is getting in on the act, helping the world’s rich move accounts from places like the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands to Nevada, Wyoming, and South Dakota.

“How ironic—no, how perverse—that the USA, which has been so sanctimonious in its condemnation of Swiss banks, has become the banking secrecy jurisdiction du jour,” wrote Peter A. Cotorceanu, a lawyer at Anaford AG, a Zurich law firm, in a recent legal journal. “That ‘giant sucking sound’ you hear? It is the sound of money rushing to the USA.”

Rothschild, the centuries-old European financial institution, has opened a trust company in Reno, Nev., a few blocks from the Harrah’s and Eldorado casinos. It is now moving the fortunes of wealthy foreign clients out of offshore havens such as Bermuda, subject to the new international disclosure requirements, and into Rothschild-run trusts in Nevada, which are exempt.

robert99 Sweden • Posts: 1360

3 5 Apr 2016

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-27/moguls-rent-south-dakota-addresses-to-dodge-taxes-forever
2013 article on tax evasion in ... South Dakota.
In South Dakota, a farm state that’s home to two of the 10 poorest counties in the U.S., lawmakers say they’re bolstering the trust industry to generate work for local law firms and bankers, and forge ties with prosperous families that may one day decide to build a factory or a warehouse here. The legislators are turning the Mount Rushmore State into the Bermuda of the prairie.
BUT! - Bernie Hunhoff, a Democrat and the House minority leader, said some in his caucus roll their eyes when the task force’s annual proposals come up for a vote. They’re aware that the trust industry drains revenue from the U.S. Treasury, which supplies almost half the state’s budget each year, he said.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-panama-papers-expose-the-gulf-between-what-the-government-says-and-does-about-tax-laws-a6968451.html
“They want to appease the angry mob without actually doing much” he said.
Yep, sounds about what will happen in the UK. sad