October 18th, 2011
Cayman News Service has blown the lid on one of the biggest lies of recent years about tax havens / secrecy jurisdiction. It’s been claimed since 2009 that tax information exchange agreements – promoted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as the way to tackle tax haven abuse – mean that tax havens are now ‘open and transparent places’.
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October 17th, 2011
On Saturday, Jeffrey Sachs, who spoke at the 2011 Task Force Conference earlier this month, made an impassioned impromptu speech at Zuccoti Park. The speech covered a range of topics, but at 8:01, he addressed tax havens:
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September 13th, 2011
On September 9th the Cayman Islands
introduced a bill for the establishment of new Special Economic Zones. The most Alice-in-Wonderland part of the bill is this bit, on page 14:
"A special economic zone shall be deemed to be outside of the Islands and not in the Islands."
Emphasis added. So where will this zone be? It seems that it will, for the relevant purposes, effectively be 'elsewhere' - which, in practical terms, means 'nowhere.' This 'it's elsewhere, don't-blame-us, we-can't-regulate-this' approach is what a lot of the activity of secrecy jurisdictions is designed to do - it's not so common,...
July 19th, 2011
Ten years ago today, the
New York Times reported the words of U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill who, in testimony:
"dismissed as meaningless a document, based on government data, presented by the senator, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, indicating that fewer than 6,000 of more than 1.1 million offshore accounts and businesses were properly disclosed and therefore legal. Pressed by Senator Levin about whether the disparity between reported offshore accounts and their actual numbers was significant, Mr. O'Neill replied: ''I find it amusing.''
The scale of it was startling, even then:
"His testimony, to the...
