Panama Papers leak: how financial services firms hide money for the rich and powerful

[boutons_deux]

Walker Guevara: We approached the Times twice in the past. The first time was in 2012 and that was the first offshore investigation we did, it was called Offshore Leaks and there were many meetings in New York where [ICIJ director] Gerard Ryle went and pitched the story and then in the end it looked like we were getting nowhere. There were just too many questions, it proved to be too complicated, and we didn't proceed. Then we went back to them again in the Swiss Leaks investigation in 2014 and in that case we were not as insistent. We sent emails but when we didn't hear back we didn't try harder.

For the Panama Papers, we were approached by McClatchy. They have a very good reputation and were eager to work with us.

We also pitched it to CNN. They said yes, but then they said no. They decided to pursue their own investigation rather than join ours. We were a little disappointed, but we understood.

Then we pitched the story to 60 Minutes and this time they said no as well.

In the end we had Univision and Fusion. We had worked with both of them in previous investigations.

They all decided to ignore news along the way.

Walker Guevara: When news on FIFA was breaking, well we had a ton of information on FIFA. But we didn't publish of course.

There was also the huge corruption scandal in Brazil.

We had more than 100 offshore companies linked to the biggest characters in that case and we couldn't publish.

https://www.propublica.org/podcast/i...ent=1460412248

Sure looks like MSM is gonna ignore, bury this story, protect the wealthy criminals, whose army of lawyers must be racking 1000s of hours protecting their clients.

[boutons_deux]

The Shared Secret Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Don’t Want You to Know

At 1209 N. Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware, the Corporation Trust Company is home to approximately 285,000 registered corporations taking advantage of the state’s loose tax laws. This dwarfs the 18,000 corporations registered at the Cayman Islands’ Ugland House. While states like Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nevada also have reputations as tax havens within the United States, Delaware is the undisputed leader.

Fortune 500 companies have over 19,000 subsidiaries registered in Delaware, while Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming have only 1,000 between the three of them.

A new investigation by The Guardian revealed that both Hillary and Bill Clinton registered corporations in Delaware — the former First Lady registered ZFS Holdings, LLC in 2013, just eight days after the end of her tenure as Secretary of State, while her husband registered WJC, LLC to handle his speaking fees. Both companies are registered at 1209 N. Orange Street in Wilmington. The Guardian reports that Mrs. Clinton’s $16 million in speaking fees were sent through ZFS Holdings, LLC in 2014.

Donald Trump, in the meantime, uses the same address for Trump International Management Corporation. Additionally, he has another registered company under the name 40 Wall Street Corporation, and the en y used for the Trump Carousel in Central Park, New York, is also registered at the Corporation Trust Company. The Republican front-runner has a total of 378 corporations registered throughout the tax-friendly state.

By registering its address in Delaware, a corporation can shift earnings in other states to be processed in Delaware, which doesn’t tax income relating to intangible assets. The Ins ute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) estimates this loophole costs other states a combined $9.5 billion in lost tax revenue every ten years. By ITEP’s calculations, a company lowers their effective tax rate by anywhere from 15 to 24 percent in a given year by registering in Delaware. The average firm saves between $3 million and $4 million annually.

On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has promised to rein in “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere.” A spokesperson for the Clinton campaign maintained innocence: “No federal, state, or local taxes were saved by the Clintons as a result of this structure.”

http://usuncut.com/politics/hillary-...rump-delaware/

[boutons_deux]

Panama Papers: Pieth says officials are in denial as he quits




The Swiss anti-corruption expert, Mark Pieth, has told the BBC he resigned from the Panama Papers commission because of government interference.

Mr Pieth said officials told him that they would have final say on whether to publish the panel's findings on the offshore tax evasion scandal.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist,also resigned.

Mr Stiglitz also told Reuters news agency he was concerned that the panel's final report would not be published.

"We can only infer that the government is facing pressure from those who are making profits from the current non-transparent financial system in Panama," he said.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-36997915

[Winehole23]

sunshine on dark money has national security implications for dark money havens?

duh.

[boutons_deux]

One can talk about "neoliberalism", good or bad, etc, etc for years, but in the end, it's total corruption of the 1% and BigCorp that's screwing us all.

[Winehole23]

tricky stuff:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/...-stick-at.html

[Winehole23]

Time for a huge British footnote: let’s revert to Deutsche Bank’s two cataclysmic UK s s, Chadborg Trade LLP and ErgoInvest LLP, for a spot of original analysis.


According to Opencorporates, the Hertfordshire maildrop that hosts Chadborg Trade LLP and ErgoInvest LLP is home to another 1,233 anonymous LLPs formed by IOS, of which 476 were active the last time I looked. The Deutsche Bank precedent (five billion bucks per LLP) implies that those 476 LLPs represent potential aggregate money laundering capacity close to $5 trillion, over a 5-year lifetime, let’s say. A trillion dollars a year seems to be plenty: UK GDP is about $2.5 trillion.


Admittedly, your wannabe money launderer, kitted out with some untraceably purchased LPs or LLPs, still needs to find a dreadful international bank willing to avert its eyes, but that’s not a big ask.

[Winehole23]

This is the context that makes The Panama Papers so very important. With this totally new evidence in hand, we now know that globalization has caused rising inequality in quite another way than the transfer of higher-paying manufacturing jobs and all other such phen*omena – very unfortunate in my view but not shameful or criminal. It is just a matter of numbers: Mossack Fonseca’s 214,000 offshore companies alone (and there are many other such s companies, formed by many other law firms) handled not millions or billions but trillions of dollars in their totality, thereby wholly subverting the presumptively equalizing effect of taxation. When the less affluent must pay their payroll taxes and income taxes in full, while the more affluent with offshore companies do not pay their own taxes, the total effect of the taxation system is regressive, even without adding the inherently regressive effects of sales and value-added taxes. Once we recognize the sheer magnitude of “offshored” income flows, and once we take into account the strongly regressive effects of supposedly progressive taxation systems, the phenomenon of rising inequality in affluent societies may not need much additional explaining – and it hardly matters if those were tax-avoidance or tax-evasion trillions.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/hidden-costs/

[Winehole23]

side-effect of globalism:

Globalization’s advocates – and they are very many, including all the varied categories of worthies on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond who preside over almost all respectable academic ins utions and elite gatherings – habitually celebrate its transfer of income from higher-income to lower-income countries while disregarding the overwhelming evidence that much of that consists of the transfer of income from lower-income people in higher-income countries to higher-income people in lower-income countries.

[Winehole23]

the straight up crooks are more sympathetic:

As the members of the consortium continued to extract actionable reporting from 2.6 terabytes of data (according to the Foreword by the Guardian’s Luke Harding, who may know better than I what a terabyte really is), they kept turning up the names of the tax avoiders and evaders who form a very large part of the members, attendants, sponsors and speakers of the elite ins utions that so earnestly strive to guide all of us towards a better future: Davos of course, the various Aspens, the much-dem*onized but merely geriatric Bilderberg, and others such, which conjointly gather the official and unofficial leaders of advanced countries along with their would-be emulators in the rest of the world.

No wonder that their advocacy of ever-freer across-the board globalization is so relentless and so enthusiastic: I, too, share their enthusiasm when it comes to snorkelling in Polynesia as opposed to the unbalmy waters of Virginia Beach, or hiking in Bhutan as opposed to the overcrowded Appalachian trail; but they are all too often thinking of their darling little companies in Anguilla, the Bahamas, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman islands, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Malta, the Netherlands, Panama, Samoa, the Seyc es, the Isle of Man, Nevada and Wyoming among many more, which are sturdily safeguarding their money from the evils of taxation.


In a specific way – and I am not being frivolous – it is the outright crooks, drug-traffickers and such, who are more honest fiscally at least, because most would dearly love to pay income taxes on their earnings, if only they could do so without being arrested, thereby acquiring legal wealth they could enjoy and show off, instead of having to launder their banknotes and hide the washed money in offshore companies whose ownership is frustratingly abstract. The outright crooks, moreover, do not pontificate on the benefits of globalization at Davos and all other such jamborees under the benevolent smile of the Clintons and Blairs and Mario Montis of this world.

[boutons_deux]

Panama Papers: Denmark to pay $1.3M-plus for leaked data to probe tax evasion

This [sample] convinced us of the quality of the do ents. They are real and they contain information that is very relevant to us. Both of specific individuals, and especially super interesting knowledge about the methods used by advisers and the middlemen they use.
This can give us a breakthrough in the investigation of tax havens.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...evasion-probe/

[Winehole23]

this is the commercial angle. governments pay money for the do ents.

[pgardn]

Panama Papers: Denmark to pay $1.3M-plus for leaked data to probe tax evasion

This [sample] convinced us of the quality of the do ents. They are real and they contain information that is very relevant to us. Both of specific individuals, and especially super interesting knowledge about the methods used by advisers and the middlemen they use.
This can give us a breakthrough in the investigation of tax havens.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...evasion-probe/

Interesting.

Could be fairly dangerous in the hands of a politicized arm of government. I could see the State of Texas using this to corral whistleblowers and send them to pasture.

[Winehole23]

tax havens have human consequences:

It is not a victimless system. A 2010 report by Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a nonprofit research organization in Washington, concluded that the total illicit financial outflows from the African continent were anywhere between $854 billion and $1.8 trillion. Shaxson quotes another study calculating the real capital flight from Africa over a thirty-five-year period to 2004 at $420 billion. He contrasts this with the total debt of these forty countries—“only” $227 million:

So, the authors [of a 2008 University of Massachusetts, Amherst, study] note, Africa is a net creditor to the rest of the world, with its net external assets vastly exceeding its debts. Yet there is a crucial difference between the assets and the liabilities…. “The subcontinent’s private external assets belong to a narrow, relatively wealthy stratum of its population, while public external debts are borne by the people through their governments.”

Shaxson, a former Reuters correspondent based in Angola, is particularly interested in the billions he estimates have disappeared offshore through opaque oil-backed loans channeled outside normal state budgets, many of them routed through two special trusts operating out of London. He adds:

Having watched people die before my eyes in Angola…I am seared by having witnessed some of the ways Africa’s people bear their public debts, in the forms of poverty, war, a hopeless lack of real opportunities and the regular physical and economic violence perpetrated against them by corrupt and predatory offshore-roaming elites… Raymond Baker, director of [Global Financial Integrity], was quite right to call the emergence of the offshore system “the ugliest chapter in global economic affairs since slavery.”

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016...den-trillions/

[Winehole23]

only slightly exaggerated:

“The economic system is, basically, that the rich and the powerful exited long ago from the messy business of paying tax,” Harding told an audience of academics and research students. “They don’t pay tax anymore, and they haven’t paid tax for quite a long time. We pay tax, but they don’t pay tax. The burden of taxation has moved inexorably away from multinational companies and rich people to ordinary people.”

[Winehole23]

Panama Papers 2.0

The new do ents reveal that Mossack Fonseca couldn’t identify tens of thousands of owners of companies it had registered in opaque, low-tax jurisdictions. Two months after the firm became aware of the records breach, it still couldn’t identify owners of more than 70 percent of 28,500 active companies in the British Virgin Islands, the firm’s busiest offshore hub, and 75 percent of 10,500 active s companies in Panama, the records show

.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/loca...213423514.html

[Winehole23]

Nicolas Shaxson on the finance curse:

A growing body of economic research confirms that once a financial sector grows above an optimal size and beyond its useful roles, it begins to harm the country that hosts it. The most obvious source of damage comes in the form of financial crises – including the one we are still recovering from a decade after the fact. But the problem is in fact older, and bigger. Long ago, our oversized financial sector began turning away from supporting the creation of wealth, and towards extracting it from other parts of the economy. To achieve this, it shapes laws, rules, thinktanks and even our culture so that they support it. The outcomes include lower economic growth, steeper inequality, distorted markets, spreading crime, deeper corruption, the hollowing-out of alternative economic sectors and more.


Newly published researchmakes a first attempt to assess the scale of the damage to Britain. According to a new paper by Andrew Baker of the University of Sheffield, Gerald Epstein of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Juan Montecino of Columbia University, an oversized City of London has inflicted a ulative £4.5tn hit on the British economy from 1995-2015. That is worth around two-and-a-half years’ economic output, or £170,000 per British household. The City’s claims of jobs and tax benefits are washed away by much, much bigger harms.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/201...britain-poorer

[boutons_deux]

" our oversized financial sector began turning away from supporting the creation of wealth, and

towards extracting it from other parts of the economy.

To achieve this,

it shapes laws, rules, thinktanks and even our culture so that they support it.

The outcomes include lower economic growth,

steeper inequality,

distorted markets,

spreading crime,

deeper corruption,

the hollowing-out of alternative economic sectors and more."

EXACTLY, the same exists in the USA, the oligarchy's cheap little lying K and oligarchy-rigged Federal judiciary gives the oligarchy an absolutely solid SCOTUS 5 to continue extracting wealth and destroying America and Americans.

All of this toxic ain't "just happening", ain't inevitable, and

it sure ain't a ING GAME like the stupid, ignorant, DUPED ST rightwingnutjobs play it.

Destruction of the environment, extraction of wealth from the non-oligarchy, World Champion Inequality of the current Golden Age were and are planned by the oligarchy, going back to Lewis Powell's memo 45 years ago.

Dems will not be able to reverse it, at best only pause it, because the oligarchy will block all progress For The People, for The Common Good.

iow, America is ed and un able.

The inevitable environmental catastrophe has passed a tipping point. And that ain't "just nature", it

Anthropogenic Global Warming FOR PROFIT

The planet is now in a vicious circle of positive feedback worsening EVERY ING PARAMETER towards catastrophe

Thanks, Capitalism.

[Winehole23]

way of the world

[boutons_deux]

Massive leak of data reveals new money-hiding secrets of superrich — and this is ‘only the beginning’

A massive trove of do ents, 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.

“Formations House was the perfect example of

a ‘one-stop shop’ for creating legal en ies 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.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/12/massive-leak-of-data-reveals-new-money-hiding-secrets-of-superrich-and-this-is-only-the-beginning/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3160

[Winehole23]

~$2T traced, about .02% of SARs

#Fincen

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

[ElNono]

^ It is what it is...

[Winehole23]

background of the FinCen leak: the 2012 DOJ settlement with financial ins utions

Even seasoned financial reporters accustomed to seeing soft-touch settlements scratched their heads at some of the deals. In the case of HSBC, the stiffest penalty doled out to any individual for the biggest drug-money-laundering case in history — during which time HSBC had become the “preferred financial ins ution” of drug traffickers, according to the Justice Department — involved an agreement to “partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior executives.” If bankers can’t get time for washing money for people who put torture videos on the internet, what can they get time for?

When I did a story on the case in early 2013, I found the HSBC settlement was the latest step in a dizzying, decade-plus cycle of offenses and ignored reprimands, involving multiple regulatory bodies. The number of times HSBC had blown off compliance orders seemed too absurd to be real. In one stretch between 2005 and 2006, the bank received (and, apparently, ignored) 30 formal warnings just from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Prosecutors insisted the deferred prosecution settlements slapped on companies like HSBC, Standard Chartered, and JP Morgan Chase were tougher than jail terms. The deals would place banks in a permanent state of quasi-arrest, with regulators granted enormous supervisory power and serious charges pre-filed and hanging over the firms going forward.
As one federal investigator put it to me back then, “This way, we have them by the short ones.”

Fast-forward eight years. On September 20th, a combination of Buzzfeed and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published the details of a major do ent leak highlighting a decade of money-laundering incidents, involving hundreds of billions of dollars and a number of the world’s biggest banks. The leak centered on a cache of over two thousand “su ious activity reports,” or SARs, filed by those banks to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a regulatory arm of the U.S. Treasury.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reveng...launderers-b84