The Greatest Haven Hypocrisy Known to Man
One of our distinguished readers, a good friend of mine, Derek R. Sambrook, is managing director of Trust Services SA in Panama. Derek has been an offshore trust and estate practitioner since 1979. He’s also a prolific author whose articles and comments appear in Offshore Investment magazine and on his website.
Derek’s latest issue of his Offshore Pilot Quarterly caught my eye. He was discussing what I consider the greatest offshore hypocrisy in existence today. In a nutshell: Politicians in the U.K. and U.S. are the most vocal tax haven critics, when the U.S. and U.K. are actually two of the largest tax havens on earth.
–Indeed, you’ll find millions of both sterling and dollars worth of “tax haven” profits on the island of Manhattan and the city in London.
Try and guess what international financial center Derek is describing here:
"I had read about one financial services jurisdiction whose companies had been involved in the laundering of some US$36 billion from the former Soviet Union…In this same jurisdiction, Russian officials had used companies to unlawfully divert US$15 million in international aid meant to fund a safety upgrade of former Soviet nuclear power plants and in another case an individual had set up more than 2000 companies, established bank accounts for them without disclosing identities, and then passed some $1.4 billion through the accounts. It turned out, in fact, that one of those companies had received over 3,700 suspicious wire transfers which, during a two-year period, added up to just over US$81 million. But the authorities could not pursue this case because they were unable to discover who owned the company due to the lax laws of the jurisdiction."
Sounds pretty bad doesn’t it? All that “suspicious money” sloshing around? So what’s your guess? Panama? Switzerland? A remote island in the South Pacific?
None of the above.
In Derek’s words: "I can tell you that none of the members of Senator Carl Levin’s U.S. Senate Subcommittee would need passports to visit it..."
P.S. Check out Derek’s full article in Offshore Pilot Quarterly: The Evil that Walks Invisible. And for more on legal ways to bank and save taxes offshore, click here. Where To Stash Your Cash: Click Here.
One of our distinguished readers, a good friend of mine, Derek R. Sambrook, is managing director of Trust Services SA in Panama. Derek has been an offshore trust and estate practitioner since 1979. He’s also a prolific author whose articles and comments appear in Offshore Investment magazine and on his website.
Derek’s latest issue of his Offshore Pilot Quarterly caught my eye. He was discussing what I consider the greatest offshore hypocrisy in existence today. In a nutshell: Politicians in the U.K. and U.S. are the most vocal tax haven critics, when the U.S. and U.K. are actually two of the largest tax havens on earth.
–Indeed, you’ll find millions of both sterling and dollars worth of “tax haven” profits on the island of Manhattan and the city in London.
Try and guess what international financial center Derek is describing here:
"I had read about one financial services jurisdiction whose companies had been involved in the laundering of some US$36 billion from the former Soviet Union…In this same jurisdiction, Russian officials had used companies to unlawfully divert US$15 million in international aid meant to fund a safety upgrade of former Soviet nuclear power plants and in another case an individual had set up more than 2000 companies, established bank accounts for them without disclosing identities, and then passed some $1.4 billion through the accounts. It turned out, in fact, that one of those companies had received over 3,700 suspicious wire transfers which, during a two-year period, added up to just over US$81 million. But the authorities could not pursue this case because they were unable to discover who owned the company due to the lax laws of the jurisdiction."
Sounds pretty bad doesn’t it? All that “suspicious money” sloshing around? So what’s your guess? Panama? Switzerland? A remote island in the South Pacific?
None of the above.
In Derek’s words: "I can tell you that none of the members of Senator Carl Levin’s U.S. Senate Subcommittee would need passports to visit it..."
P.S. Check out Derek’s full article in Offshore Pilot Quarterly: The Evil that Walks Invisible. And for more on legal ways to bank and save taxes offshore, click here. Where To Stash Your Cash: Click Here.
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