My del.icio.us bookmarks for January 28th through January 29th

These are my links for January 28th through January 29th:

• FT.com / UK / Business – Call to make bail-out banks list havens – More coverage for the TUC research on bank use of tax havens

  Of course what they're doing is legal

  But we know that 40,000 people admitted using them to facilitate their tax evasion in the Crown Dependencies in 2007

  They can't deny their part in facilitating that. UBS made this part of their business model. If these banks did not do so explicitly for them to deny they knew the risk would be absurd.

• Mercopress: Record capital flight from Argentina last year: 23 billion USD – Capital flight is destroying the developing world

  And it's not a passive activity: our banks knowingly take this cash, much of it routed (inevitably) through tax havens

  Never doubt it: the pinstripe mafia of offshore lawyers, bankers and accountants cause untold misery, poverty and death

• Companies keen to move tax away from UK – Accountancy Age – "The number of companies thinking of shifting their tax base away from the UK has more than doubled since 2007, KPMG’s annual survey of tax competitiveness has found.

  Fourteen per cent of Britain’s 50 largest businesses were actively considering moving their tax residence in 2008. One company had already made the shift."

  Of course they are KPMG

  Why not go to Iceland and see who'll bail you out there? Or Ireland?

  "

• Troubled Times Bring More Ponzi Inquiries – NYTimes.com – "The number of other people who have been caught running Ponzi schemes in recent weeks is adding up quickly, so much so that they have earned themselves a nickname: mini-Madoffs."

  It's the consequence of the culture

  And a lack of transparency

  It's the opacity that is crippling us

• Jeffrey Sachs: Rewriting the rulebook for 21st-century capitalism | – I'm not a Sachs fan overall. But this is right:

  "Free-market ideology is an anachronism in an era of climate change, water stress, food scarcity and energy insecurity. Public-private efforts to steer the economy to a safe technological harbour will be the order of the new era."

• The good news on Satyam | AccMan – Dennis adds useful thoughts to the debate
• FT.com / Companies / UK companies – RBS rebuffed investor calls for executives to quit – But why are the non-execs still there?

  Get rid of them now

• FT.com / Companies / Banks – Iceland’s biggest listed bank ponders London switch – Treasury please note: London has a lot of attractions still, albeit to bust banks

  We hear from KPMG about those who want to leave – most of whom are inconsequential

  But the power to attract remains IF we get our reforms right, and tax has almost nothing to do with that

• FT.com / Companies / Industrials – GE closer to losing top credit rating – If you supply crap debt what do you expect?

  The credit card book in GE must be horrible right now

• FT.com / Companies / Financial Services – PwC chief in India as Satyam probe widens – Going, going …….
• FT.com / Companies / Banks – Santander makes offer to Madoff victims – Never ever again tell me that opacity pays