Financial Transparency Coalition

The following is for all serious offshore aficionados.  It comes form the person I think the foremost expert on the European Union Savings Tax Directive - Mark Morris, and is from his blog, with permission. What it says is at the end of the day simple, but vitally important, and that is that iof the European Union Savings Tax Directive is amended as the EU desires then Liechtenstein's secrecy is cracked open. Which is very welcome indeed. Over to Mark: "Liechtenstein is home to nearly 100,000 entities and legal arrangements which are effectively untaxed. These structure are used for succession planning, creditor protection, family support...

As stuff.co.nz reports:

Tax haven activist Nicholas Shaxson has hit out at New Zealand for opposing a plan to create a UN body to tackle tax haven abuse. Shaxson, who has become famous following the publication of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, said New Zealand is letting down the developing world. He has also revealed that New Zealand has a growing reputation as an offshore haven itself. He predicts New Zealand will appear on the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index by 2013. In January, New Zealand’s permanent mission to the UN in New York said...

I have the following article in the latest edition of the London Review of Books:

In his budget last month George Osborne announced that if in the future a UK company runs its internal banking arrangements through a tax haven subsidiary it will benefit from a special tax rate of just 5.75 per cent of the resulting profits. The rate is exceptionally low: the same activity undertaken in the UK is taxed at 23 per cent. It is a change that will delight corporate tax avoiders everywhere: the UK will now condone the use of tax havens in locations such as...

This wasn’t meant to happen in the last decade. Money laundering regulation was meant to have stopped the handling of drug cash in the USA. The Patriot Act was meant to have closed down such things. The FATF 49 recommendations were meant to have been in place. But as the Observer reported yesterday, US bank Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo, money laundered hundreds of billions for Mexican drug gangs in the USA. And, when the activity was questioned internally from London, the money laundering officer who did so was driven out.