Queen Of England Must End Secret Pirate Offshore Banks, EU Cracks Down On Tax Havens

 

 

Her fant Dagens Næringsliv 47 milliarder – DN.no: The above photo is from a Norwegian newspaper showing the office in Cyprus which processes and files paperwork from hedge funds and offshore wealth.  Namely, it is totally unprocessed and completely unregulated by anyone.  All the weeping and wailing stories about uninsured Cyprus banks giving back less than 60% of the money parked there has to stop.  The country deliberately refused to honestly deal with anything.  The government there colluded with the banks to not properly supervise business.  And the recent Cyprus event where it joined the EU was done under false pretenses.  This was due to the lax to non regulation of the banks there.

 

EUobserver.com / Economic Affairs / UK deal on Caribbean tax havens boosts prospect of EU-wide crackdown

 

The new deal covers islands including Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

 

The information will be shared by Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, which agreed in June last year to work together to combat tax evasion…Ending bank account secrecy will be the main subject up for discussion at the May European Council summit. EU officials are pressing Austria to drop its veto on EU-wide legislation obliging banks and governments to exchange data on their citizens’ bank accounts abroad.

 

For its part, Austria has accused the UK and the United States of shielding their own tax havens, with finance minister Maria Fekter, describing Britain as “the island of the blessed for tax evasion and money laundering.”

 

Panic on Wall Street as the tycoons there see the writing on the wall.  They, like many EU corporations and rich families, have happily used Queen Elizabeth’s islands and other royal hide-outs to conceal wealth.  A reader sent me an email telling me about Mr. Shaxson’s work on offshore wealth accumulation.  I highly recommend this book by the reporter:  The Book | Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the men who stole the world | A book by Nicholas Shaxson

 

Millions of people have a queasy feeling that something is not right in the global economy – but they struggle to put their fingers on what exactly the problem is. Treasure Islands at last tells the real story of where it all went wrong. This is the great untold story of globalisation.

 

Tax havens are not exotic, murky sideshows at the fringes of the world economy: they lie at its centre. Half of world trade flows, at least on paper, through tax havens. Every multinational corporation uses them routinely. The biggest users of tax havens by far are not terrorists, spivs, celebrities or Mafiosi – but banks.

 

Tax havens are the ultimate source of strength for our global elites….

 

Using wealth hidden overseas or in various pirate operations, the very rich have had sufficient funds to bribe or undermine every democracy on earth.  Instead of paying for the common good, they use private wealth to buy political power which they then use to enable tax evasion by the very rich.  So they cynically use the military and industrial power of various states to enrich themselves while contributing near-zero to the common good.  Much of this spending has been turned into debt which is then passed onto the general population in the form of ‘austerity’ which means no social services for citizens.

 

Tax havens aren’t just about tax. They are about escape – escape from criminal laws, escape from creditors, escape from tax, escape from prudent financial regulation – above all, escape from democratic scrutiny and accountability. Tax havens get rich by taking fees for providing these escape routes. This is their core line of business. It is what they do.

 

These escape routes transform the merely powerful into the untouchable. “Don’t tax or regulate us or we will flee offshore!” the financiers cry, and elected politicians around the world crawl on their bellies and capitulate.

 

Buying stupid bitcoins doesn’t stop this garbage!  Money can’t be reformed so long as people refuse to understand money is created for trade purposes.  Free trade was the open door for exploitation of labor and offshore banking.  We see in the recent collapse killing over 1,000 workers in Bangladesh how ‘free trade’ weakens labor protections while Walmart and Target, for example, get rich selling cheap foreign produced goods in the US.  Then, the profits from this are offshored so the people who own these corporations pay virtually no taxes.

 

Here is another story from Shaxson:  The capture of tax haven Ireland: “the bankers, hedge funds got virtually everything they wanted” « Escape from Europe

 

In the ‘Ratchet’ chapter of Treasure Islands I compared Delaware’s Big Bang of 1981 with another episode in the British tax haven of Jersey a decade later, and discovered a remarkable, even astonishing similarity between the two. I would boil that down to three words: the Captured Financial State. And that is exactly, precisely what has happened in tax haven after tax haven. Cyprus, it turns out, was exactly the same…

 

First, it began in the US as Wall Street used the small state of Delaware which was mainly farmland, to prevent NY from taxing their profits.  Another story from the same writer:  A way to help pay for Cyprus’ bailout? Plus a note on Liechtenstein « Escape from Europe

 

Norwegian-born Fredriksen is a shipping tycoon whom Forbes described as “King of the tanker trade.” He became a Cypriot citizen in 2006 to benefit from Cypriot tax laws even though he reportedly lives in The Old Rectory in Chelsea in the UK, which has at least ten bedrooms, a ballroom and gym. The Sunday Times rich list describes him as Britain’s seventh richest man.

 

Until 2006 Fredriksen’s main holding company, Greenwich Holdings, was based in Cyprus, and in 2006 it paid a dividend of US$ 4.5 billion. The dividend went to a Panama-company with undisclosed owners. It has been impossible to confirm who actually received the money.

 

Although Cypriot holding companies themselves incur no taxes on dividends paid from overseas, individual Cypriot company owners are supposed to pay some tax on dividends they receive. As a Cypriot citizen at the time, if Fredriksen had been the recipient of that $4.5 billion, he would have been liable to a 15% tax on the dividend. However, he did not pay this: he told the Cyrpus tax authorities that the owner of that Panama company was not him but another Panama company…

 

Mr. Shaxson has written extensively about offshore or tiny isolated kingdoms being used by international businessmen as tax havens.  He mentions that Liechtenstein, a tiny Alpine principality is now under great pressure from the EU to reveal banking records.  The money flowing into Liechtenstein’s pirate banks has fallen greatly in recent years causing the government to loose money from fees.  Norway is finally being pushed to track down wealth from corporations.  Note that Mr. Fredriksen lives in London.

 

England can’t tax him, either, because he lives in the City and not the country of England.  The City is one of the world’s biggest pirate banking operation and no one in England outside of the City can do a single thing about this.  The Queen’s main palace is inside this City.  And she has dictatorial powers over it but not the country.  So she sits silent at Parliamentary events and only reads speeches by the ruling party of the time.  But she has a lot to do with the running of the offshore/London City’s pirate banks!

 

Mr. Shaxson realizes this, too, like myself:   t’s time for Europeans to call Britain to account for its tax haven empire « Escape from Europe

 

And who appoints the governor? A dear old 86-year old lady, who commands widespread respect around the world and is known by her title “The Queen”. Or, if you want a more formal position on this:

 

“The United Kingdom Government are responsible for defence and international relations of the Islands, and the Crown is ultimately responsible for their good government. It falls to the Home Secretary to advise the Crown on the exercise of those duties and responsibilities. The United Kingdom Parliament has the power to legislate for the Islands. . . “

 

When the rich can bribe or own or be politicians and then write laws regulating their wealth so it is not taxed, we get things like the French Revolution or WWI and WWII.  Corrupt politicians are exceedingly dangerous.  AIPAC and Wall Street own our Congress which steadily ignores the true wishes of the electorate.  In Japan, the far right wing nationalists under Abe’s ‘stealth’ constitution plan raises civil rights fears.  Abe and the LDP are trying to rewrite the constitution there taking away freedom of speech, muzzling the press, removing women’s rights and other goodies which our own right wing wants to do here.

Email:

emeinel@fairpoint.net

MAILING ADDRESS:

EMS NEWS

P.O. BOX 483

BERLIN, NY 12022

Make checks out to ‘Elaine Supkis’

Click on the Pegasus icon on the right sidebar to donate via Paypal.