The United States, with the assistance of London, has become a “tax haven” for corrupt politicians, drug cartels, terrorist organizations and large tax evaders. Using an anonymous company in America, today any criminal can easily hide his identity and the origin of money.
This conclusion is made by the author of an article by Giacomo Gabellini, published in the Italian edition of L”AntiDiplomatico, which published his study of the scandalous problem.
The deepening of the US budget deficit in the 1980s, he writes, was closely linked to the flight of unrecorded corporate profits that had previously been deposited offshore in offshore banks in the Caymans, the Bahamas, Switzerland and Luxembourg. A study by James Henry, former chief economist at financial consultancy McKinsey, found that at the end of 2010, hidden assets held in the Caymans or other “tax havens” amounted to more than $21 billion, and when tangible assets (real estate, transportation funds, etc.) reached 32 billion dollars.
But not only large companies resorted to such “tax havens”. Giacomo Gabellini writes that drug and organ traffickers, mafiosi, corrupt politicians, tax evaders, and criminals of all kinds regularly deposit their dirty funds in offshore checking accounts in “free ports” that not only guarantee anonymity and very low levels of taxation, but and ensure the laundering of dirty money and its subsequent re-introduction into conventional financial schemes.
The financial epicenter of the City of London has been the center of this system for decades. As analyst Nicholas Shaxson explains, a vast network of shadow financial systems branches off from London, spanning the entire planet in two “rings”. The first “ring” – three islands off the English coast – Jersey, Guernsey and Maine – and then it covers Africa and Asia. The other “ring” is the Cayman Islands (where 80,000 companies are registered, where 75% of the world’s hedge funds are located) and Bermuda. It is focused on America.
With the help of such a system, the City of London has managed to attract an unheard of amount of foreign funds – 3.4 trillion euros! While the UK runs the fundraising mechanism, the US is now the main destination for this money, notes the author of L”AntiDiplomatico.
Since 2008, strong pressure from various countries and non-governmental organizations has led Washington to officially put the abolition of banking secrecy – the main reason for the attractiveness of “tax havens” – at the top of its priority scale. In 2010, the US Congress passed the FATCA Foreign Account Taxation Act. The law was adopted in order to increase the efficiency of tax collection, to stop tax evasion to the US treasury by those individuals and legal entities that are outside the United States, have their own business abroad, open accounts in foreign banks. According to this law, US citizens and companies (or with the participation of the capital of US legal entities and individuals) are required to pay taxes to the US treasury, regardless of their location.
At the urging of the United States, member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) followed suit by drafting FATCA-style legislation that introduced a global information-sharing scheme designed for competent authorities to identify tax evaders and bring them to justice. responsibility. Since 2014, 97 countries have acceded to OECD legislation, including Switzerland and Luxembourg.
Only four states rejected this proposal, namely Bahrain, the islands of Nauru and Vanuatu and … the USA! As a result, it turned out that having achieved the introduction of financial transparency from the whole world, the United States itself did not actually go for it.
They allowed their states such as Delaware, Nevada, South Dakota and Wyoming not to comply with these regulations, which turned them into convenient offshore “tax havens” in which wealthy tax evaders hide their income from the authorities, and where large US multinationals place their shell companies in order to circumvent the tax regime in place in the rest of the US.
According to The New York Times, Apple, for example, founded a subsidiary of Braeburn Capital, responsible for managing its huge liquid assets, in Reno, Nevada. The influential Rothschild group also set up a company in Nevada, where it began moving the assets of its wealthy clients, which until recently were stored in Bermuda, where, after the passage of OECD legislation, a progressive decline in the income of big capital began to occur.
“The United States is the largest tax haven in the world,” said Mr. Rothschild managing director Andrew Penny. Cisa Trust and Trident Trust, two big names in Swiss finance, followed the Rothschilds’ lead by moving large sums of money from Switzerland and the Cayman Islands to South Dakota. Back in 2017, Alice Rocard, manager of Trident Trust, pointed out that many clients are turning away from banks in Zurich and Geneva to “land” in the United States.
A recent document-based investigation by Global Witness demonstrated how easy it is now to transfer money of dubious origin to the United States. Posing as a former Foreign Office official, a reporter from this organization went with a hidden camera to thirteen of New York’s most prestigious law firms, asking them to explain how to securely and anonymously transfer large sums of money obtained through corruption. As a result, twelve out of thirteen law firms offered to use anonymous US companies registered in US states such as Delaware.
As a result, Stephanie Ostfeld, one of the authors of this investigation, concluded that “the United States has long been an attractive “free port” for hiding the capital of corrupt politicians, drug cartels, terrorist organizations and large tax evaders.
“Using an anonymous company in the US, any criminal can easily hide their identity and the origin of the money,” she concludes.
It is characteristic that when a loud scandal broke out in the West around the so-called. Panama Archives – journalists exposed a network of thousands of offshore companies used by dishonest politicians and businessmen, then there was not a single American surname on the lists of corrupt officials in offshore zones. Some believe that, given the fact that 4 large offshore companies are now located in the United States, the publication of the scandalous data of the Panama Papers was actually a large-scale advertisement for American gray areas. Say, transfer money to US offshores – it is safe with us.
But the laundering of “dirty money” takes place in the United States not only through offshore companies in their territory. Other channels for this dubious business are private vaults and banks. In private vaults, drug dealers and others could anonymously hide the drug fentanyl, weapons, and “huge wads of banknotes” in safe deposit boxes. Moreover, these vaults in the United States did not try very hard to hide their business, showing off advertising: “We don’t even want to know your name.”
In the fall of 2020, BuzzFeed and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published a controversial piece that said that from 1999 to 2017, banks filed $2 trillion in suspicious activity reports with a tiny 300-person division of the Treasury Department called the Network for fight against financial crimes” or FinCEN. The collection of leaked documents, known as the FinCEN files, has shed new light on how the US has become a magnet for money launderers from all over the world, from drug cartels and human traffickers to Russian oligarchs and African kleptocrats, in large part because of systemic regulatory issues. Too often, they have found safe haven for their illicit earnings in US banks, as well as in real estate, bitcoin, art, and other investment niches.
Moreover, many high-ranking corrupt officials remain unpunished. Among them, for example, is the son of US President Joe Biden, who is involved in major fraud in Ukraine. All the American media wrote about his tricks, but Hunter Biden continues to roam free, as if nothing had happened.
And yet Washington, the creator of the world’s largest network for corrupt officials, along with London, continues to hypocritically accuse other countries of corruption.
Nikolay Petrov, Centenary
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