The IMF is undertaking reviews of many offshore territories in 2008 with regard to their money laundering compliance.
Jersey is rolling out new legislation every few days as a result - which is sure evidence for me that external pressure works. And they have prosecuted one unqualified accountant for money laundering, which follows the normal pattern [...]
My correspondence with a member of the financial services community in Guernsey is continuing.
I have made a simple suggestion to him. This is that every bank in the Channel Islands and Isle of Man had a duty after 1 July 2005 to report all their customers to whom the EU Savings Tax Directive applied and [...]
Two people claiming to be Channel Island’s financial services operators have been making extensive comments on two blogs on this site. Despite the claims of those who suggest I censor this site worse, I have undertaken considerable correspondence with these two precisely because it has been so revealing.
The first correspondent appears to be with a [...]
I seem to have touched a raw nerve in Jersey and Guernsey with a recent blog (There are lies, d***ed lies and some in the offshore financial services industry).
Maybe it’s the word ‘lied’ they don’t like - but let’s be clear, the analogy was with the capacity of statistics to convey misleading information, for those [...]
Dennis Howlett was on the ball whilst I was away in Brussels that last couple of days.
First about the Revenue’s data loss. As he rightly said, this is an IT issue, not a tax one. Second, he was spot on to say that the ICAEW is wrong to say
that the causes are likely to be [...]
I note that Nick Shaxson has re-christened the Channel Islands the Selfish Isles on the TJN blog, and ne’er was a name so well chosen.
I’m afraid there’s another Selfish Isles story from this weekend to illustrate the point, this time from the Guernsey Evening Post, the partner to Jersey’s Evening Post. Peter Body, the editor [...]
The Jersey Evening Post had an article in its pages on Friday with the title:
Any truth in Murphy’s Law?
The Murphy is question turned out to be:
arch enemy of tax havens Richard Murphy.
I know that’s me because they referred to my blog from last Monday on the Isle of Man failing to secure EU approval for [...]
The Guardian has reported that:
The Serious Fraud Office has begun a new investigation into British links with one of the biggest corruption inquiries in Africa. UK firms won huge contracts from the Kenyan governments of presidents Daniel arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki, but anti-corruption investigators have discovered that many were fictitious and amounted to state-sponsored [...]
There’s wide coverage this morning of the purchase of Telent (the last rump of the old GE / Marconi empire) to the Guernsey based Pension Corporation. As the Times reports it:
Telent agreed to a £400 million takeover by a subsidiary of Pension Corporation, a Guernsey-based retirement fund consolidator that is run by the private equity [...]
Why is Ed Balls on the Channel Islands all-party parliamentary group for the Channel Islands?
I’d really likely to know.
