Financial Transparency Coalition

The Tax Justice Network has long listed Israel as a tax haven - but most ignored the claim. Now the Sovereign Society is going out of its way to promote Israel as a tax haven. On this occasion we seem to be in agreement. And I don’t say that very often.

It’s not hard to imagine a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah quickly spiraling into a full-scale regional war. Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, has already declared that his government would support the Shiite military organization if a new war broke out with Israel. A recent paper authored by Jeffrey White and published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argues that if war were to come to Israel’s northern boarder it would be “transformational” and “fateful.” White argues the participants would fight the war over extensive portions of Lebanon, Israel, and probably Syria, “featuring large...

We recently wrote about the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, describing it as a form of (albeit one-way) automatic information exchange, to help the U.S. tax authorities ferret out tax cheats. A new Reuters story (hat tip: Offshore Watch) highlights one of the effects:

Leumi (LUMI.TA), Israel's biggest bank, is requiring U.S. clients to declare their deposits to the Internal Revenue Service, amid heightened scrutiny of offshore accounts by U.S. authorities. The bank is asking its clients to declare that they are not U.S. clients, or to reveal their ...

Newsweek--Israel's former prime minister is only the latest to be called corrupt. Why is the nation's political class plagued by scandal?