While Panama received the brunt of the press after the release of the papers, London and Hong Kong is where the shuffling of money occurred. Graham Vanbergen at Global Research explores how this takes place.
For a long time TruePublica has consistently reported that Britain is the centre of the global money laundering business with its London Headquarters and network of off-shore tax havens. We have challenged reports and studies that have protected ‘The City’ and its army of suited mobsters that openly defy both domestic and international financial legislation whilst it administers the global looting machine.
TaxJusticeNetwork have just released this article that starts to focus where the real crimes of the financial services industry are committed as the European Panama Papers Committee gets its teeth stuck just that little bit deeper into the global crime wave of the rich and powerful – in London.
Last year the Panama Papers scandal shook the world and lifted the lid on murky offshore dealings in spectacular fashion. The political consequences and investigations, criminal and otherwise are far from over. The European Parliament set up the Panama Papers inquiry committee tasked with investigating “alleged contraventions and maladministration in the application by the EU Commission or member states of EU laws on money laundering, tax avoidance and tax evasion.” Today Bloomberg reports that the committee begins a series of ‘secret fact-finding meetings’ in London for two days. It has come to the heart of the beast.
We have always said that the Panama Papers could just as well have been branded the ‘British Virgin Islands Papers’, since that British Overseas territory was revealed as a Mossack Fonseca favourite, whose most important secrecy offering comes from it’s “lax, flexible, ask-no-questions, see-no-evil company incorporation regime.”
The UK has a special responsibility to take a global lead on tackling financial secrecy. The United Kingdom runs a global network of Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies that includes some of the world’s biggest tax havens — including the Caymans, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda and Jersey. If all of the UK’s satellite jurisdictions were rolled into one, the UK would be number one in the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index.
Since the Panama Papers scandal hit in April 2016 there has finally been a push to force these jurisdictions, as the UK has every right to do, to create public registers of beneficial owners of companies through the Criminal Finances Bill, currently going through the British Parliament.
The EU’s Panama Papers Inquiry Committee’s current visit to London is covered here by Bloomberg’s Ben Stupples. He reports that:
“the leak identified nearly 2,000 U.K.-based intermediaries—such as accountants, lawyers and tax advisers—who helped facilitate individuals or entities with tax evasion or avoidance”
That’s the first time we’ve seen that specific number. It doesn’t mean that all those on that list have broken any laws, such is the problem with the law as it stands, but use of Mossack Fonseca supplied offshore structures on such an industrial scale raises a lot of questions.
We don’t know where this EU inquiry might lead but among the questions to consider is how realistic the prospects of effective investigation and enforcement are, and whether the British government has the political will to take action.
What governments do and don’t do to deal with the offshore industry strikes at the heart of whether the exercise of power is in the interests of the many, or the few. As the Tax Justice Network’s John Christensen says today,
“this is about the ability to protect elites from democratic rules and accountability. This is what offshore provides to elites and the banks who serve them.”
Among those with whom the commmittee will meet over the next couple of days is the U.K.’s special task force on the Panama Papers from the UK tax authorities, officials from HSBC, the Law Society of England and Wales, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales.
We’ll await the results with great interest.
There are so many simple solutions the world can just issue an international benifcial owners card something like a passport. would have the person ID and tax number of their country and each private company is required to have a copy of those for all owners. then is easy and done for everyone. One applications processes to get your card and the lawyers and corporate structures can go on without these billions of wasted $ doing KYC over and over for the same person. Do it once get the card and be done. All the secrecy is gone problem solved. Of course the real issue is probably how to solve the problem yet still allow the wealthy to hid their assets. Which is understandable as through out history the poor like to chop the heads off of the rich and steal everything they have so they can waste it on completely none productive things and sink into poverty through mismanagement of wealth.
It is understandable why people want everyone to pay their “fair share.” But folks have been brainwashed into believing the share itself is in anyway fair. The globalist system of enslavement is encroaching every day upon the personal liberty and freedom of every human being. Freedom loving people should not be applauding the conquests of this cancer upon humanity, but rather seeking ways to destroy it. It is insane to believe you are better off paying more taxes, having less privacy and less freedom. Such thoughts are the thoughts of a slave. Folks are sadly focusing on symptoms rather than causes, and that’s exactly what the elites of this world want. Don’t look over here where the real root of the issue lies, look over there at those horrible people who have figured a way to find some small amount of freedom. For, you see, the real root of the issue lies in the monetary system, a system that requires far more taxation than necessary. Why? Because the global monetary system, at least that used by all countries except the few not yet conquered by the western bankers such as Syria and Iran, utilize a debt based money system wherein all money exists only because a bank somewhere in the system has made a loan to someone. Therefore, all money in existence is earning interest payable to a bank. Think about that. Rather than money being either issued directly by the treasury to pay for public goods and services or minted from a nation’s natural supply of precious metals, all money used by the state is first borrowed. And interest must be paid to the lenders, who are primarily banks. And surprise, surprise, the annual income tax equates almost exactly to the annual interest expense on that debt. And funny how the income tax did not even exist until the central banking system in the US was established in 1913 to effectuate this money from debt scheme. THIS is where economic justice warriors should be focusing their efforts. Not on fringe operations like “tax havens.” Do humanity some real good and focus on abolishing the debt based monetary system. Anyone can go onto Youtube and learn more about this scam than a roomful of PhDs in economics possess. But few will bother.