One way to solve a Panama crisis

The U.S. Army turned to psychological warfare, blaring rock music at "deafening levels," gunning the engines of armored vehicles against the Nunciature's fence, and setting fire to a neighboring field and bulldozing it to create a "helicopter landing zone." Reportedly the song "I Fought The Law" by The Clash was played repeatedly...

I'm not recommending parking the onshore world's tanks on Mossack Fonseca's immaculately-tended lawn, then turning the amps up to 11, you understand. Just saying that an army of shifty lawyers and tax consultants wouldn't last ten minutes against a few squaddies armed with the expensive kit we paid for with our taxes and, unlike most recent military interventions, this one would pay for itself many times over, instead of losing billions. You could, for instance, call it an international anti-piracy operation or something.

I think this is this what think tanks call "starting a conversation."

Wake up and smell the coffee

David Cameron will be hosting an international tax and anti-corruption summit in London on 12 May. Sadly, "Most anti-corruption Summits have failed in the past because the governments that turn up do not want them to work." For example:

At the G8 in 2013, David Cameron pledged to make tax dodgers ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ and Oxfam welcomes the fact that the UK is about to introduce a public register of company owners - which will help crack down on the use of shell companies to avoid tax. But three years after the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies committed to look at introducing public registries of the beneficial owners of shell companies in their jurisdictions, so far only one Overseas Territory, Montserrat, has taken action.

Is that Panamanian coffee I can smell, Prime Minister? Or did you get one of your staff to collect a take-out from Starbucks?

Sarcasm aside, it would "be reasonable to say that benefitting from an offshore trust may influence Cameron’s view on whether such trusts should be tightly regulated or not." But we're all sure you'll be on it and closing down those loopholes before you can say "conflict of interest."

We're waiting...

...and waiting...

Making plans for Nigel

What could be more embarrassing for a party leader than hosting a major summit to discuss offshore tax havens when everybody knows that your own family fortunes have been stashed away in an offshore tax haven?

Probably nothing, but being a party leader who tried to stash some of the family cash in an offshore tax haven, but apparently failed to make any money with this cunning plan, must come a close second. Poor Nigel Farage - not just another out-of-touch member of the Westminster elite, although not for want of trying.

Spanking some BOTs

Post-Panama Papers, people seem to be waking up to the novel idea that the British government might conceivably be able to exert some influence over what goes on in British Overseas Territories, rather than shrugging and muttering "Nothing to do with us, guv":

Corbyn argued that the government should tell administrations in places like the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands: “Hang on, you are a government of a British dependent territory, a crown territory, you must obey UK tax law, you must not become a harbour for tax avoidance and tax evasion.”

So sez Jez.

I'd just like to take the opportunity of reminding anybody who cares* that I was into this before it was cool:

I still wonder whether the precedent of what Britain did to the Chagos Islands opens up another possibility. If the UK government has the power to deport the entire population of one of its overseas territories and send every single man, woman and child into exile for 45-odd years, maybe for ever, why can't it decide, in the national interest, to shut down the tax havens operating in some of the other ones?

Me, last February**. Good to have you on board, Jez.


*i.e. nobody, probably.

** Well, linked back to last Feb - I started wondering why HM govt couldn't do anything about this back in 2013.

Banana monarchy

We may no longer be a world-beating steel producer but, by jingo, modern Britain can show Johnny Foreigner a thing or to about running a global tax-dodging and money laundering industry:

Looking at the documents leaked from Mossack Fonseca and one thing is clear: Britain's network is once again at the core. More than half of the companies listed in the documents are registered in the UK or its Overseas Territories, and Hong Kong plays a huge role.

Of course, this shouldn't be surprising. Britain has for a while now been thought to be the global capital for money laundering. And it's no shock that nothing has been done about it. In 2010, two years after they crashed the global economy, the City paid for more than half of the Conservative party's election campaign, helping (along with the aforementioned Lord Ashcroft) them limp over the line, with a Lib Dem shaped crutch. Though, of course, Labour did little to regulate in the previous 13 years.

If we want to understand modern Britain, first we need to realise that our primary economic function in the world is probably our network of tax havens. After all, around $21tn is estimated to sit in offshore accounts, of which Britain's territories are said to make up by far the biggest part. Our own GDP is only around $3tn.

openDemocracy

Yep, we're still the top banana at something. Makes you proud to be British.

Keywords

[Mossack Fonseca] is also keen to keep its reputation in order. Another internal mail contained a copy of an agreement being negotiated with Mercatrade SA for online reputation management (ORM). Here, Mercatrade commits to removing negative entries that can affect MF’s reputation on the main Google search results page. “Negative entries appear for 13 keywords and a corrective strategy is needed,” the draft agreement states. Among the keywords, five were in English: money laundering, tax evasion, tax fraud, dirty money and scandal.