In late September 2020, Premier and Minister of Finance of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) Andrew A. Fahie announced plans to establish a "publicly accessible register of beneficial ownership for companies." From a press release:
Honourable Fahie noted that the BVI is honoured to be a premier international finance centre and continues to dutifully embrace the responsibility that comes with this reputation, which is to adhere to global standards in combatting money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism and to avoid the misuse of its companies, products and offerings for the furtherance of illicit or nefarious deeds.
The British empire was a globe-spanning criminal enterprise that produced vast riches for England (and, to a lesser extent, Scotland and Wales) by stealing the lands of others while slaughtering and enslaving them; today the empire is in decline and the UK is no longer reliant on direct looting.
Bloomberg's Ben Steverman offers a long and exciting profile of Gabriel Zucman (previously), a protege of Thomas Piketty (Zucman was one of the researchers on Piketty's blockbuster Capital in the 21st Century) who has gone on to a career at UC Berkeley, where he's done incredibly innovative blockbuster work of his own, particularly on estimating the true scale of the wealth gap in the USA and worldwide.
On May 26th, Europeans will vote for the next EU Parliament, and the region's far-right, "nationalist/anti-establishment" parties (AfD Germany, UKIP/Brexit UK, PiS/Poland, etc) are expected make large gains, possibly prompting a realignment of power in the EU; the far-right parties have campaigned as "anti-establishment," tapping into frustration with elites and their corruption.
The USA has moved up in the Tax Justice Network's Financial Secrecy Index to number two, behind Switzerland; in reality, though, the UK is the world's worst money-laundry, but because its laundering activities are spread out over its overseas territories — taken as a whole, the UK leads the world in helping criminals and looters hide their fortunes.
The UK is one of the easiest places in the world to set up a shady company, which is why accused Mafia money-launderer Antonio "Tonino the Blond" Righi set up his shell company Magnolia Fundaction UK with Britain's Companies House, giving an address in Soho.
One of the consistently underreported elements of Brexit and all that's come after it is that leaving the EU will also let the UK — the world's most prolific launderer of filthy criminal money — escape the tightening noose of European anti-money-laundering measures.
This week on the Tax Justice Network's podcast (previously), they profile (at 20:40) the OECD's Tax Inspectors Without Borders, through which poor countries loan each other their most effective tax collectors to help catch the tax-dodging multinational corporations who drain the countries' economies — and the organization transfers tax enforcement expertise in the process.
The Tax Justice Network's Estimating the Price of Offshore Revisted report says that over $21 trillion has been squirrelled away in offshore tax-havens by 90,000 super-rich tax-cheats (0.001% of the world's population). The crime was abetted by a network of "enablers" from banks like UBS, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs. — Read the rest
