G20 Prepare for Clampdown on Tax Havens

"European leaders are mounting pressure on offshore finance centres….
Gordon Brown's called for a 'global new deal' to sort out the world's
financial crisis. He met with other senior officials to hammer out
policies, including a clampdown on hedge funds and tax havens. Concerns
have been raised about how Guernsey will be affected by the G20's plans
but local politicians have played down those fears. The G20 members
will all meet again in London in April."
with grateful thanks to cable and wireless website

As CDJ says tick tock tick tock

Youre scaring me!What do we do,stock up on essentials?

Start growing tomatoes :-))))))

lower fares ,bring back the bucket and spade brigade .grow and export more.

All good ideas Thistle, but; How?

Lowering the fares of already not particularly profitable routes isn't going to be easy.

Encouraging tourism isn't going to be easy (in Jersey the tourism industry is held back by a lack of foresight or acceptance of development)

Growing: I don't know much about growing, but I believe the island's farmers are pretty good at it so that might not be too hard.

Exporting; to where? we can't do it cheaper than places that fly produce in year round to the UK.

i guess so but anything is worth a try.maybe if the fares were lower they would come over with full boats and planes

Anything? What about a theme park on the south coast?

My point being that reviving tourism (and I'm talking Jersey here) is IMO possible, and would be a good thing for the whole community, but to do so would require more than simply spending more on glossy ads., it could be done with the development of market leading products... but people baulk at the mention of building a resort hotel or a new night club etc. etc.

Just lowering the fares wouldn't work, there has to be a good, compelling reason to came too, and who pays for the initial risk of subsidised fares? the tax-payer? good luck selling them that idea.

Lowering fares is not the answer. Guernsey needs a complete overhaul of it's self-catering accomodation. The present general standard of most of it is abysmal or too expensive for families.

The G20 and tax
Haven hypocrisy

Mar 26th 2009 | BERLIN
From The Economist print edition
Big economies are leaning on offshore tax havens. But greater abuse may be taking place at home

MONEY launderers are moved by greed, unlike Jason Sharman, a political scientist at Australia’s Griffith University. Yet with a budget of $10,000 and little more than Google (and the ads at the back of this paper), he showed how easy it was to circumvent prohibitions on banking secrecy, forming anonymous shell companies and secret bank accounts across the world. In doing so he has uncovered an uncomfortable truth for many of the leaders of Group of 20 nations meeting on April 2nd to discuss, among other things, sanctions against offshore tax havens. The most egregious examples of banking secrecy, money laundering and tax fraud are found not in remote alpine valleys or on sunny tropical isles but in the backyards of the world’s biggest economies.
Panoramic Images Wyoming, the Switzerland of the Rocky Mountains

At issue is not banking secrecy as the Swiss once knew it, where discreet men in plush offices promised to take the names of their clients to the grave. This is a more insidious form of secrecy, in which authorities and bankers do not bother to ask for names, something long outlawed in offshore tax centres such as Jersey and Switzerland but which has persisted in America. For shady clients, this is a far better proposition: what their bankers do not know, they can never be forced to reveal. And their method is disarmingly simple. Instead of opening bank accounts in their own names, fraudsters and money launderers form anonymous companies, with which they can then open bank accounts and move assets.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in America. Take Nevada, for example. Its official website touts its “limited reporting and disclosure requirements” and a speedy one-hour incorporation service. Nevada does not ask for the names of company shareholders, nor does it routinely share the little information it has with the federal government.

There is demand for this ask-no-questions approach. The state, with a population of only 2.6m, incorporates about 80,000 new firms a year and now has more than 400,000, roughly one for every six people. A study by the Internal Revenue Service found that 50-90% of those registering companies were already in breach of federal tax laws elsewhere.

A money-laundering threat assessment in 2005 by the federal government found that corporate anonymity offered by Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming rivalled that of familiar offshore financial centres. For foreigners, America is a particularly attractive place to stash cash, because it does not tax the interest income they earn. Thus with both anonymity and no taxation, America offers them all the elements of a tax haven.

Change may be coming in America, but slowly. In March Senator Carl Levin proposed a law forcing states to identify the beneficial owners of corporations. “For too long, criminals have misused US corporations to hide illicit activity, including money laundering and tax fraud,” said Mr Levin. “It doesn’t make sense that less information is required to form a US corporation than to obtain a driver’s licence.”

Yet a similar bill introduced last year died a quiet death in committee.

America is not the only rich nation Mr Sharman tested. He tried to open anonymous shell companies and bank accounts 45 times across the world. These were successful in 17 cases, of which 13 were in OECD countries. One example was Britain, where in 45 minutes on the internet he formed a company without providing identification, was issued with bearer shares (which have been almost universally outlawed because they confer completely anonymous ownership) as well as nominee directors and a secretary. All was achieved at a cost of £515.95 ($753).

In other cases Mr Sharman formed companies by providing no more than a scanned copy of his driving licence. In contrast, when trying to open accounts in Bermuda and Switzerland, he was asked for documentation such as notarised copies of his birth certificate. “In practice OECD countries have much laxer regulation on shell corporations than classic tax havens,” Mr Sharman concludes. “And the US is the worst on this score, worse than Liechtenstein and worse than Somalia.”

It's all to do with people's perception is it not.Close down a few obvious havens then lets get on with our usual schemes.It seems to be the way of the world.

It seems to be a classic political tactic. When the tiger ( ie Public opinion ) is getting too close to your bum for comfort, throw out a few tit bits to distract it long enough for the fuss to die down.

I can't really see that tax havens ( whether they be right or wrong ) have been any part of causing the current fiasco.

The securitisation of debt was a function of removing mortgages from the balance sheet and moving it 'offshore' to hide the shenanigans from regulators and so create the issues we have now, namely nobody knows what the extent of the toxicity in other banks is so they refuse to lend to each other. Secrecy Jurisdictions have been at the forefront of the 'credit crunch'.

Tax payers around the world are now paying for the lack of transparency and the gluttony of those that support that secrecy.

It will hit the poor countries the hardest of course in a myriad of ways.

Surely it is the lack of security or collateral on loans that is the basic cause of the problem. That has nothing to do with off-shore funds.

I don't follow your logic at all.

Yes, but instead of advertising the problem with the bad debts in their accounts they invented ways of packaging bad with good and those instruments were then rated as good. These instruments were allowed to be moved off balance sheet and placed in 'offshore' jurisdictions to be traded in the barely regulated markets that sprung up around it.

kingcolemk wrote:
I can't really see that tax havens ( whether they be right or wrong ) have been any part of causing the current fiasco.

Then its time you opened your eyes

And it's time you learned some manners.

Dobry Vecher