petoto @ redam88 700q jarum606 rxgg pagarjp caca177 Offshore Finance Hurts Us—All of Us

The economic harms of offshore finance are far-reaching, often involve illicit actors, and have burdened the world for decades.

Consider Teodoro Obiang, who has ruled Equatorial Guinea (EG) since 1979, placing him among the longest serving national leaders in the world. Obiang has also looted his country’s coffers, including hundreds of millions of dollars from the country’s lucrative oil industry, over the course of his rule. Yet though these large oil reserves give EG the third-highest GDP per capita in all of Africa, his theft has left the government unable to pay for basic services like health care and education. As a result, EG ranks among the lowest for per capita income on the continent.

Or consider Isabel dos Santos, the richest woman in Africa. She is the daughter of former Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos, who, like Obiang, plundered his country’s mining industry. Thanks to her father’s corruption, Isabel dos Santos is worth billions, while 94 percent of Angola’s rural population lives in poverty, without access to basic services. 

In too many countries, stealing the money is the easy part. Government budgets are seldom transparent, making it next to impossible to account for revenues and expenses. Kickbacks and other bribes are strictly off the books and out of public view. 

The hard part for kleptocrats like Obiang, dos Santos, and others is where to hide the money. Up to a point, you can bury it in the back yard, of course; Latin American drug cartels used this method for years. But to hide amounts in the millions of dollars requires a more sophisticated investment strategy. A sudden in-country deposit of several million dollars would draw scrutiny. 

The offshore financial system provides an ideal solution.

Anonymous shell companies created by lawyers, accountants, and other corporate formation agents provide the necessary secrecy for the criminal and the corrupt to steal and hide funds with impunity. Stolen funds, laundered through a series offshore corporate structures with secret ownership, come out “clean” and ready to use for luxury items and a lavish lifestyle.

This secrecy, however, comes at a cost that can’t be hidden. Experts estimate that less-developed economies lose three times as much money to offshore havens as they receive in aid. A once-promising Nicaraguan economy has fallen into disarray as the President and his partners have siphoned millions of dollars from the treasury into offshore bank accounts, stalling major infrastructure projects and chasing away foreign investment. The top general in Venezuela watched his country’s economy crumble and poverty soar as he stole public funds and, through family members, evaded sanctions by means of investments in offshore accounts. Perhaps the most brazen recent example is that of the Malaysian President, who moved $4.5 billion from a state development fund into offshore accounts he controlled with the assistance of Goldman Sachs. That amount is almost twenty times larger than the total amount Malaysia receives in foreign aid in any given year. The lost investment may impact more than seven million rural Malaysians.

When a scandal breaks—the Panama Papers or, more recently, the FinCEN Files—we often think of it as just another story about the wealthy beating the system—unfair perhaps, but not truly harmful to ordinary people. The hidden money seems so divorced from our everyday lives that it’s hard to do more than shake our heads and add it to the list of things these days that make us cynical. 

But there is a cost—and it’s one that burdens Americans and citizens of developing nations alike. When U.S. companies move to offshore havens to avoid paying taxes, Americans suffer because of that lost revenue. And in trying economic times like these, the costs are even greater. Even as they avoided paying U.S. taxes, offshore entities lobbied hard to ensure they would still eligible for government bailouts amid the COVID-19 crisis. (A company’s offshore residence and the profits shifted abroad are not factors in determining eligibility for recovery funds.) Every dollar an offshore claims means one less dollar for small businesses that truly need the funds to stay afloat. An August survey found that one in four small businesses believes it will not survive to the end of the year without additional funds. As offshore investors take bailouts and avoid taxes, small businesses close, jobs disappear, and the recovery needs to account for additional victims.

The media can play a part in exposing the hidden costs of the offshore world. When stories of stolen funds or hidden wealth in offshore accounts surface, journalists should focus less on the clever structuring of the transactions and more on the human element. We should be hearing more about the impact of offshore money used to purchase real estate in Miami or New York—how it drives up prices and chases moderate-income families from their neighborhoods. Or how buildings bought by offshore companies as a place to park illicit funds, but not to live or work, kill the downtown foot traffic that city storeowners depend on. Affordable housing and local entrepreneurship are but two of the many casualties of offshore finance. To be sure, offshore does the greatest harm to developing countries, but all countries pay a price. And all countries have a role in shutting it down.

The U.S. Congress is currently considering a bill, the Corporate Transparency Act, that would unmask anonymous companies. This is a critical first step. Only through measures like these, coupled with international agreements and cooperation, can we end the abuses of offshore finance. Inclusive Global economic growth and development depend on it.

Gary Kalman is the Director of the U.S. Office of Transparency International.

grandbed88 @ sl44 wining303 sltr888 pus26 ujanjp 888xhapk A Recent College Graduate Discovers Offshore

I didn’t discover the world of offshore and kleptocracy myself. It was my sister, Darcy Tuttle, who first explained it to me. Her work got her interested in the details of money laundering scandals. One day, she started explaining to me the role of London-based financial intuitions in these schemes – I happened to be studying abroad at Oxford at the time – and I was dumbfounded. 

How could a county with a robust democracy and strong rule of law serve also as a hub of transnational crime and corruption? While champion democracy around the world, rich countries and their peripheries where undermining it through their financial and legal infrastructure. The hypocrisy of it ate at me. 

I started voraciously reading all the stories I could find from organizations like OCCRP, ICIJ, Transparency International, Global Financial Integrity and the Kleptocracy Initiative and from journalists like Oliver Bullough. I began to learn how offshore influences almost every part of global politics and economics. 

I discovered how not only the U.K. but also the United States was engaged in this hypocrisy – except the hypocrisy was even worse in the U.S. While maintaining a reputation for the most aggressive anti-money laundering enforcement in the world, dirty money could easily flow into the U.S. as a direct result of the laws of states like Delaware and Nevada. 

When it came time to write a senior honors thesis, I knew I had to write about that hypocrisy and the political system in the U.S. that sustained it. I decided I wanted to bring data to bear on the common assumption that U.S. states were driven by financial motives to create policies that embrace secrecy. What I found was a complex system of legal and regulatory capture of state governments in Delaware and Nevada by the professional enablers of global kleptocracy – specifically corporate lawyers and corporate service providers.

I think the topic of corrupt offshore finance is very compelling for my generation which grew up in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis and ever-rising income and wealth inequality. It feels like the economic system is rigged against democracy and justice and the offshore world makes it very clear that in many ways it is. I don’t think the next generation of leaders steeped in these events will tolerate the perpetuation of offshore by the governments of rich democracies, at least that is my hope. 

Click here to link to Bryce Tuttle’s thesis

putih34 @ belitar4d kokowins kei123 toyota333 pepe168 monferatoto It’s Not Them, It’s Us

The way to defeat crooks is not to join them but to fight them relentlessly, to fight without mercy or quarter.

Those words, uttered by U.S. Congressman Wright Patman in 1967 in his fight against gambling lobbyists, could just as easily be applied to the scourge of tax havens and their private-sector enablers and clients.

Sadly, the world’s richest countries have preemptively decided they can’t beat the offshore crooks, and so have instead joined them. We don’t crack down effectively on offshore whorehouses because, as tax expert Lee Sheppard once put it, “the town fathers are in there with their trousers around their ankles.” Making things worse, rich countries have engaged in a race to the bottom to attract the world’s mobile financial capital and its richest people by offering tax cuts and loopholes, oligarchic laws on family trusts, secrecy facilities, and more. 

As a result, the three worst players in the offshore system today are probably Britain, the U.S., and Switzerland. (Nearly all the other significant havens are rich countries or satellites of rich countries.)

This is where power resides—so this is where the fight must succeed. And that’s a problem.

Most people love the idea of cracking down on foreign tax havens, which harm their own country by helping domestic criminals and tax cheats. But if your country is the tax haven, vacuuming up the world’s dirty money, that’s different. Sure, we hate it that poor countries get looted but, hey, it’s flowing into our financial system, and, well, we like the money! Let’s join the crooks and discreetly get rich! That, alas, is no formula for a crackdown.

Happily, we can cut through this challenge. 

First, reframe the problem not as a geographical fight between countries, but as a global battle pitting ordinary hardworking folk against a rootless, law-avoiding global elite and their “enablers”: bankers, law and accounting firms, real estate agents, and family offices that protect their wealth. Don’t target the tax havens, so much as go after these private sector enablers and clients.

Second, tax authorities, financial regulators, and law enforcement agencies have been gutted since the 1980s, in country after country, in the name of “efficiency.” The explosion in tax cheating, financial shenanigans and organized crime is the (inefficient) result. Reverse the cuts, and tackle the predators. These measures will pay for themselves, many times over.

Third, take on the concept of the “finance curse:” When a financial sector grows too large, it harms the country that hosts it. Those inflows of dirty money into the U.S. and Britain may make a few “enablers” rich—but overall they make those countries poorer.

How so? Most obviously, through abetting kleptocracy and its insidious influence. David Marchant of Offshore Alert said that when he sees titles like “Lord” or “Sir” in an offshore structure he is investigating, he treats it as a red flag. This illustrates how thoroughly offshore finance has corrupted British elites. One only has to say “Trump” or “Manafort” to see the same in the U.S.

But the finance curse and those inflows of dirty money also inflict other wounds. They foster steeper inequality and make housing unaffordable.  As financial inflows push up local price levels, exports are hurt. They lead to a “brain drain” of talented people out of civil society, government, and private sector industries and into finance. These people, who might have discovered a Covid-19 vaccine or helped build a better health system, are instead devising devious tax schemes to help Amazon cut its tax bill or cooking up secrecy laws for organized criminals.

In fact, a swathe of academic studies from the International Monetary Fund and many others in the past decade shows the harm clearly: Countries like Britain or the U.S., which have oversized financial sectors relative to their economy, suffer lower economic growth. Too much finance can make you poorer. In other words, get rich by stopping the inflows and shrinking the financial sector.

Here lies a magic formula for a proper crackdown. Once people see that these inflows of money looted from poor countries flowing into their country hurts them and their country, they will demand that we stop joining the crooks, and fight them at last.

motul77 @ suge133 gurih889 kalek24 bold138 77yk sinar29 Whistleblowing, Vital to Combatting Offshore

Whistleblowers are vital to revealing and combatting illegal offshoring activity, and to identifying the networks of “respectable” white collar enablers who make these crimes possible. What Martin Woods, who blew the whistle on Wachovia Bank’s extensive laundering of Sinaloa drug cartel money, said about bankers who help cleanse drug funds is also true of the entire class of offshore enablers: “Banks that launder money are parasitic organized crime groups. . . . People who forget the criminal nature of money laundering need to remember that the banker’s finger is right there next to the killer’s, on the trigger of the gun.”

The inherent secrecy, complexity, and international nature of offshoring ensures that, in most cases, only insiders with direct knowledge of the wrongdoing are in a position to disclose the identities of these typically unseen triggermen. Whether acting in their own names or anonymously, whistleblowers have unmasked every major offshore scandal of the past decade. Without bold and determined whistleblowing by figures like Rudolf Elmer at the Swiss bank Julius Baer, Bradley Birkenfeld at USB, and the unnamed insiders who released the so-called Panama Papers and Paradise Papers data to the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), we would probably never have learned of many massive fraud schemes.

Despite vicious legal retaliation and threats of far worse, offshore whistleblowers have helped to reveal the vast reservoirs of illicit cash built by wholesale tax evasion. Indeed, as detailed elsewhere on this website, the global offshore total of hidden wealth may well be $50 trillion or more. Whistleblowers offer revealing looks at how such offshore wealth facilitates state kleptocracy, the laundering of criminal proceeds, terrorists, warlords, and trafficking in illegal drugs, weapons, and human beings.

Whistleblowers also draw attention to the wide array of players who exploit offshore havens, including ones who pose direct dangers to ordinary citizens: We see drug and arms traffickers rubbing elbows with politicians and heads of state. We see mafia lords, Fortune 100 corporations, billionaires, and celebrities all pooling their resources for mutual gain.

More broadly, whistleblowers help us all to understand how wholesale, normalized tax evasion is contributing to the malignant growth of inequality in our societies, the decay of infrastructure, healthcare, and education, and the weakening of democratic ideals.

We as a society are not powerless in the face of these malignant forces. There are several things we can do to encourage more whistleblowers to come forward and shed light on these offshoring abuses. First, we must advocate for stronger laws to protect and incentivize whistleblowing—by creating new mechanisms to protect their identities, and by ensuring that their revelations are heard not just by lawmakers and prosecutors but by the general public as well. Second, we must strengthen laws that protect media and other institutions and individuals who disseminate whistleblower revelations about offshoring. Finally, we must encourage the enforcement of existing laws against the various practices implicit in offshoring and urge lawmakers to pass harder-hitting legislation against these practices.

Perhaps the most important action we can take as a society, however, is to call out the countless enablers of illegal offshoring activity: those top executives in their immaculate, pressed white collars who, as Martin Woods said, have their fingers on the trigger, right next to the killer’s. Whistleblowers have spotlighted the central role of bankers, lawyers, real estate brokers, investment advisers, and other executive shills in keeping the illegal cash flowing smoothly and continuously. The enablers of offshoring deserve worldwide opprobrium—and stiff new legal sanctions to match the crimes they help commit.

Tom Mueller’s latest book is Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud (Penguin Random House, 2019)

eskobartoto @ javaslot garuda304 dewakakek caca177 gondlong888 bajaja4d Ukraine: Between Offshore and Russia – Tough Neighborhood

Ukraine is corrupt.

To be sure, many Ukrainians are fighting corruption, including the Anticorruption Action Centre, the NGO that I lead. But they cannot do it alone, because Ukraine’s corruption has roots that extend well beyond the country’s borders. Global offshore secrecy networks hide the ill-gotten fortunes of the powerful oligarchs who are intent on keeping Ukraine corrupt.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s kleptocratic regime, backed by the KGB and other secret agencies, has cultivated an untouchable caste of rich and powerful oligarchs in Ukraine. These oligarchs have been robbing ordinary taxpayers of billions of dollars and hiding their fortunes abroad by means of a complex chain of offshore companies. In exchange for this easy money and power, the oligarchs repay the Kremlin with loyalty by suppressing the rule of law and governance reform in Ukraine. For more than two decades, Ukraine’s oligarchs have been reinvesting capital laundered through offshore entities into the national political projects, television channels, and private armies that ultimately decide who wins elections and governs the country. Whenever honest politicians or fresh pro-reform political parties emerge, the oligarchs immediately set their well-funded machines to work smashing them through disinformation campaigns and partisan prosecutions.

I have spent the past eight years advocating for anticorruption reforms in Ukraine. Aided by pressure campaigns from civil society and international partners, we have managed to set up complex asset-disclosure mechanisms for public officials, as well as an independent National Anticorruption Bureau, which brings criminal charges against Ukrainian kleptocrats. But the more successful these anticorruption reforms are, and the bigger the threat they pose to oligarchs’ fortunes and freedom, the more we come under attack by fraudsters from outside Ukraine. Using funds laundered through their offshore vehicles, oligarchs are busy investing in Western lobbyists, slick PR consultants, and high-priced lawyers who are all too eager to set their sights on small Ukrainian NGOs in exchange for billable hours.

The implication of this process—of Ukrainian oligarchs using offshore secrecy to build up their massive stolen fortunes, which they then dole out to their Western partners to defend them—is that it is impossible to build a rule of law state in Ukraine simply by focusing on change inside the country. We also need to dismantle, to “de-create,” the offshore network that empowers Ukraine’s corruption.

This thought gives me reasons to feel both frightened and optimistic.

I feel frightened, because democratic institutions worldwide are currently under assault by strategic corruption. What can a small person like me, with very limited resources and from a developing country like Ukraine, do to stop such a juggernaut? Oligarchs empowered by kleptocratic regimes like Russia are corrupting the Western world invisibly, slowly, much as harmful radiation reaches deep into a healthy body to corrupt its DNA.

But I also feel optimistic, because I know that I am not alone, and that Ukraine is not alone. Millions of people across the globe are standing up against oligarchic thieves and the offshore entrepreneurs who enable them. There are thousands of journalists and watchdog activists and hundreds of law enforcement officials of high moral probity who are seeking to expose how offshore secrecy enables corruption. What we also need more of—and what groups like the Offshore Initiative hope to do—is to help more ordinary citizens, to help more voters, understand how the global system of offshore secrecy poses a direct threat to them. 

Daria Kaleniuk is Executive Director of the Anticorruption Action Centre in Ukraine