From the Irish Independent:
AIB's stockbroking arm used black-listed tax havens to circumvent rules preventing it from buying and selling the bank's shares, the bank's former auditor told a Dail committee yesterday.
Goodbody Stockbrokers used a complex scheme which involved companies based in the Caribbean island of Nevis and the South Sea island of Vanuatu, and exploited an innocent Londoner who happens to share the surname Furstenberg with one of Germany's richest brewing dynasties, said former AIB auditor Eugene McErlean.
The scheme was designed to hide the beneficial ownership of the AIB shares by using obscure tax havens with strong secrecy rules. At that time, Nevis was named by the Financial Action Task Force as one of the 10 tax havens in the world actively promoting money laundering.
Market rigging. Insider dealing. Fraud.
An every day story of the use of tax havens.
And let’s be clear: evidence from the markets suggests the a significant proportion of major share announcements are preceded by major price movements suggesting insider dealing - and I’ll guarantee 100% of it is done offshore.
And that not a cent of it is ever considered suspicious by those arranging it.
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In some of the “tax havens” you despise so much insider dealing has been a crime for twenty years. There is also robust all crimes legislation which would cover this activity and additional fraud legislation being introduced. I would suggest to you that areas like the crown dependencies where robust legislation is already in place has forced the naughty folk at AIB to go to one of the disreputable jurisdictions to set up such a vehicle.
Going back to insider dealing I am sure there is a lot of it going on all over the world. Unfortunately it is hard to prove and in the UK alone, from memory, there haven’t been that many prosecutions.
“An every day story of the use of tax havens” – more scaremongering based on what…keep it up, this blog makes me laugh.
Oh, something I forgot to mention…what’s your view of the Madoff fraud? This appears to be something that was done under the eyes of the US & UK regulators affecting companies, pension funds, individuals etc etc. The estimated fraud totals around the £35bn mark and so far it doesn’t look like it involved offshore financial centres…although I bet you wish it did – yeah?
I suppose what I am saying is insider trading, market rigging, fraud etc can happen anywhere in the world and it is down to the regulators, legislation etc to be able to detect it/ stop it.
I also see there is a fraud on AIB in the UK making the news today…about £55m. I wonder what happened there onshore in the UK and who will suffer in the end?
[…] by Richard Murphy@Tax Research UK […]
John
No prosecutions at all that I know of offshore
And why none on shore?
Because of the secrecy offshore provides
Richard
Madoff was, I note fed from offshore
Richard
From memory (and it was a while since I sat my professional exams) there were single digit prosecutions for insider dealing in the UK. So not much difference to the offshore situation.
John
What do you mean fed? The funds came from offshore or something else? It’s still a very big fraud committed under the noses of the US & UK regulators.
So many of the Madoff investors were offshore, I’m sorry I didn’t realise the investors in a Ponzie scheme were the ones committing a fraud.
There I was thinking the investors being defrauded were the victims. and the lack on onshore supported regulations were at fault
Is there any clearer evidence of Mr Murphy’s unreasonable bias on Offhore
Creg
Of course I’m not biased – Madoff was a fraud in New York. It revealed regulatory failure – but then I am a massive critic of regualtion in the UK and US – which shoiuld have helped prevent a crash as well, and did not
But there was also Stanford……
And there is still a difference. Onshore is not set up to systematically facilitate fraud. Offshore is. That’s a pretty fundamental difference, don’t you think?
Richard