Exposed: 20 Trilion USD In The Secret World of Offshore Tax Havens

[PathWalker]

http://www.moneynews.com/FinanceNews...4/04/id/497879

Unmasked: The Secret World of Offshore Tax Havens
Although the mega-rich and influential often use complex offshore havens to hide assets, own yachts and art masterpieces and avoid taxes — often with the help of some of the world’s biggest banks — lower-income individuals also use offshore accounts, a new study from the Washington, D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reveals.

The ICIJ, in conjunction with a group of investigative journalists, cataloged a smorgasbord of shady dealings by the wealthy and others — including government officials — in an exhaustive 15-month investigation.

In all, 86 journalists from 46 nations used high-tech data to sift through millions of leaked documents going back decades.

Caught up in the net of the tax shelters are American doctors and dentists, Wall Street swindlers, Russian executives, international arms dealers and families of despots, among others.

“We already knew how secret and inaccessible the offshore industry is, but we were surprised by now vast and far-reaching it is,” said Gerard Ryle, director of the ICIJ.

"We expected to find only the mega rich using [offshore accounts]," he told CNNMoney. "But in fact we found it was being used by a much broader section of society."

The exhaustive effort “sheds new light on the methods used to deceive fiscal authorities and hide money,” German magazine Spiegel stated.

According to CNNMoney, the hidden accounts included proceeds from Ponzi schemes and money drained from nations’ coffers, with the cross-border proceeds as high as $1.6 trillion annually.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. This secret world has finally been revealed,” Arthur Cockfield, a law professor at Queen’s University, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The ICIJ said about 130,000 people were identified in the documents, many from unnamed sources believed to include banking industry informants.

The list included government officials and their families and associates in Azerbaijan, Russia, Canada, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Canada and Mongolia.

Well-known individuals named included composer Denise Rich, whose ex-husband Marc Rich, a hedge fund boss, was pardoned by then-President Bill Clinton after being prosecuted for tax evasion.

The names of at least 450 wealthy Canadians were identified, including that of high-profile class action lawyer Tony Merchant, according to the Financial Post.

Others included the late German society playboy Gunter Sachs, an ex-husband of actress Brigitte Bardot; Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman; Imee Marcos, a provincial governor in the Philippines and the eldest daughter of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos; the daughters of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev; and Spanish baroness Carmen Thyssen-Baornemisza, according to Spiegel.

ICIJ said it questioned the deputy speaker of Mongolia's parliament, Bayartsogt Sangajav, about records showing he has an offshore company and a secret Swiss bank account in which he had deposited over $1 million. "I shouldn't have opened that account," he told ICIJ reporters, Spiegel reported. "I probably should consider resigning from my position."

The ICIJ identified some of the world’s top’s banks – including UBS, Clariden and Deutsche Bank – as having aggressively worked to provide their customers with secrecy-cloaked companies in offshore hideaways.

The offshore havens cited included the British Virgin Islands, Cyprus, Cook Islands, Switzerland, Panama and Liechtenstein.

International partners in the ICIJ effort included The Washington Post, BBC, The Guardian, La Nacion, Radio Free Europe, Asahi Shimbun and a long list of others.

“Perhaps most surprising is that much of what we will be revealing over the next few months is perfectly legal,” the ICIJ said in a statement.

“The extreme secrecy offered by tax havens also facilitates the use of anonymous entities to commit crimes, evade taxes, hide assets from creditors and avoid regulations. This secrecy can ultimately undermine democracy by granting a certain class of individuals the ability to play by a different set of rules.”

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/n...ax-haven-probe

Mysterious mail triggers global tax-haven probe
The cascade of WikiLeaks-style revelations shedding light on the often murky world of offshore tax havens began when Gerard Ryle received a mysterious letter in the post.

The experienced investigative journalist had been busy trying to unravel the details of a large financial fraud in his native Australia when the prospect of an even bigger scoop landed on his doormat.

The letter contained part of a hard drive with the details of 2.5 million digital files, a treasure trove that would ultimately yield information on 120,000 offshore companies and nearly 130,000 individuals.

Ryle, who moved to Washington to head the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) soon after receiving the hard drive, admits he was not entirely sure what he was dealing with at first.

"My instinct told me it was big but you do not know," Ryle told AFP. Technical impediments also frustrated his early attempts to pore over the information he had received.

"The files were almost impossible to read, they kept crashing my computer," Ryle said. "I've seen a lot of names from all around the world; they were people that meant nothing to me.

"I just did what any reporter would do -- you just go on the Internet and you Google them."

In his capacity as head of the ICIJ, a non-governmental organization founded in 1997 to help co-ordinate the work of reporters seeking to uncover corruption, Ryle set about mobilizing a worldwide army of journalists to help mine the rich seam of information he had received.

"It's always been on my mind to get some help from reporters all around the world," Ryle said. "The ICIJ was the perfect vehicle."

The ICIJ coordinated a 15-month long probe that involved 86 investigative journalists in 46 countries to compile a series of reports it began releasing around the world this week, using a strategy similar to that used by WikiLeaks when it released hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables in 2010.

So far, the revelations have made waves in several countries, causing embarrassment to French President Francois Hollande's former campaign treasurer Jean-Jacques Augier, as well as the family of the president of Azerbaijan.

Ryle cautioned, however, that many of the individuals brought to his attention by the hard drive may not have broken any laws.

"What you first realize is that you can't accuse people of doing something wrong because you don't have the full story, you don't know what they've declared in taxes," he noted.

"You kept asking yourself: where's the story here? Is it illegal? Your instinct tells you it's a story but you need to find it, you need to look for patterns, for trends."

Recruiting the services of foreign journalists to decipher the information was necessary because of the vast amounts of detail in the hard drive, estimated as being 160 times larger than the cache released by WikiLeaks, totaling some 260 gigabytes of data.

The ICIJ's efforts were also assisted by an Australian software company that provided free software to help make sense of the information in the files.

"I approached the firm and said 'Don't ask me why I need it but can you give it to me?'" Ryle recalled.

He also acknowledged that the sheer scale of the global investigation went against the instincts of many of those journalists involved.

"I wanted to encourage collaboration among journalists, something that we, investigative journalists, normally don't like to do. We like to work on our own and keep our secrets," Ryle said.

Other revelations are set to be released on April 15, while the ICIJ promises further reports later this year.

"We're pretty confident we have a lot more because it's so vast and it takes a long time to understand," Ryle said, adding that he was not concerned about whether the revelations ultimately lead to criminal prosecutions.

"It's not our duty -- our duty is to report and to let other worry about that," he said. "Our job is to inform the public about something they didn't know and what people or authorities do afterwards is up to them."

The disclosure site here:
http://www.icij.org/offshore

[PathWalker]

I am extra super happy to the news, hope this will escalate the full down of financial tyranny.

There is already a suspicious observation on the exposure sources and motives. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/45...scheme-bvi.htm

ICIJ Offshore Tax Haven Secrets: An Inside Job?
How was it possible to steal reams of files from a paradise island that belong to the super-rich?

That will be the question on the lips of furious millionaires and billionaires who may well be screaming down their phones to their highly paid financial adivisors, wealth managers and bulge-bracket bankers, furious that one of the biggest data dumps in history revealed the sordid financial secrets of some of world's richest people.

Up to $20tn is suspected of being stashed away from the public eye in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands.

Drenched in sunshine and boasting idyllic scenery, the mega-rich no doubt expected their wealth was safe in such tax havens - far from the taxman back home.

But all that has changed, following a historic leak to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) of sensitive data about the huge private fortunes hidden away by public figures.

Somehow, somebody gathered up millions of files containing details of transactions which were never meant for to be seen in public. Experts believe they had to have been transferred onto a hard disc from a centralised clearing house.

A total of 260 gigabytes of information was then crammed on to hard drive by the tax haven deep-throat and then sent by the most traditional of communication technology, the post to Gerald Ryle, director of ICIJ, in Washington DC.

That way began the gruelling process of sifting through the equivalent of a half a million books of raw data. More than 40 media outlets in 46 countries worked for 15 months, joining the dots to build up a web of transactions of activity which has now been put into the open.

As a result, the ICIJ daylight has been thrown on the murky world of refined tax avoidance - and a vast cabal of the rich and powerful have been caught with their proverbial swimming trunks down.

Not too many questions were asked of mega wealthy depositors when they employed the opaque - and legal - services on offer in those far-away lands. But the questions are now being asked, for certain.

It is hoped the exposure of the information could aid criminal investigations gone cold and shed light on claims made by public figures about the true nature of their affairs.

The list of names reads like a proverbial who's-who of the global elite and also includes the wife of the former Thai owner of Manchester City FC, Thasksin Shinawatra.

A politician in the former Soviet province of Mongolia has indicated he may quit public life over what has been revealed about his secret fortune.

Meanwhile, litany of big fish swept up by ICIJ's diligent work includes members of the great America families. James R Mellon, of the Mellon oil and banking dynasty, appears in the new files

He has previously admitted using offshore companies for tax reasons, insisting: "I have never broken the law."

A steady stream of releases in to the public domain is promised and it threatens to make uncomfortable reading for the global, monied elites who would rather nobody knew about their hordes of cash.

Attention to sure to turn on to finding the source of the leak. Was it a disgruntled employee of one of the funds with a vendetta? Was it a public interest warrior believing they are on a mission to cleanse the murky world of offshore tax avoidance?

Or maybe it was a computer hacker with the skills to unlock one of the web's most heavily guarded portals.

Fury and a quest for answers is likely to be the main reaction among those whose affairs have been dragged in to sunlight.

One thing is certain, that today the champagne fizz has gone flat for some of planet Earth's richest citizens - for now at least.

[PathWalker]

Another observation, since these is all extra secret information.
All the information sources are questionable.
Therefore there is specific intention from a specific PTB group to target specific PTB group.
One wonder why wikileaks is out of the picture here, and this channel was used to release the information.
I also wonder who sponsors http://www.icij.org/offshore I prospect hard time for them, with lots of fame, and vicious attacks.

If I was on the list (I wish ), there was no way I could deny it. Like proving I have no sister (a Hebrew word pun).

Notice the deep involvement of the MSM, this could not happen without the approval from TPTB. This is probably another financial counter attack. To the attack on private accounts on Cyprus.

It is possible to identify the attacking faction by recognizing who is not in the list. Hint, hint, look for the big money in Guns, Oil, Drugs, Sex (GODS).

One more thing, I wonder is the leaked files are available to the bublic (my self) for authentication.

[GoodETxSG]

Wait until the Petro Dollar Crashes soon after the Euro... BOOM, what will all of those digits in those off shore accounts amount to? Maybe this is why so many are hoarding Gold, but even more so buying Silver Eagle's as fast as they are produced.

I would love to know how that stashed money will have value after a crash and total devalue of the Dollar/Euro.

[PathWalker]

I hope this information reaches the controlled MSM.
Please post your observation about this in the MSM.

Currently I hear nothing in the Israeli MSM, nor the Arab MSM.
Hope for the better.