Deadline passes for disclosure deal » Business » This Is Jersey.
The Jersey Evening Press reports:
ANY UK residents who did not meet a deadline to declare the contents of offshore bank accounts now face the prospect of immediate investigation for tax evasion.
But it is expected that very few Jersey account holders would have been among those rushing to tell HM Revenue & Customs that they had money secretly squirreled away here.
The secretary of the Jersey Bankers Association, Martyn Scriven, said that there may well have been a rush for information in ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ like Switzerland and Liechtenstein. But he said that it was much less likely that Jersey account holders would be among those confessing to having withheld details of assets from HMRC.
43% of all Jersey account holders from the EU did not information exchange with their domestic tax authority in 2008 under the European Union Savings Tax Directive. The only likely reason for not doing so was tax evasion.
On which basis it's likely that tens of thousands of account holders in Jersey should have declared liabilities now, and haven't.
But the bankers go on persuading themselves all is OK without ever seeking the evidence as to what's really happening. And yet we apparently have to trust them on fiancial regulation.
I don't.
PS One curious thing - they're now using the language of secrecy jurisdictions, first widely promoted on this blog.
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I love the semantics on this one “…there may well have been a rush… like Switzerland and Liechtenstein…but much less likely [than] Jersey…”
Surely ‘much less’ than ‘secret’ is still ‘a bit secret’?
Why doesn’t anybody know?
I was always under the impression that sophistication, as the CIs sell themselves, implied a high degree of exactitude.
“One curious thing – they’re now using the language of secrecy jurisdictions, first widely promoted on this blog.”
A very strong sign that you’re being read, and your messages are hitting home. Keep going – you’re winning.
Spot on. Jersey, like other “secrecy jurisdictions”, lives on in blissful denial. What could possibly shake them into reality. They truly believe they do no wrong. Perhaps they are right; just like money has no smell.
Banking is amoral, as has been demonstrated amply in the last two years, so we won’t see bankers being interested in anything other than making money. With apologies to Admiral Lord Nelson, “I really do not see the signal, Damn the signal, Keep mine for close action flying!” (the actual quote often mis-stated as ‘I see no ships’).
Our economic model in Jersey has been based on trust companies, Swiss correspondent banking relationships and the bank accounts of UK residents. Wew need to change the model if we are going to survive; and the signals are all there.
Richard offers a partial view of the future, but for our government it will need to be far better thought out before anything is implemented.
The Girrl