The National Audit Office Report on the Crown Protectorates is shocking. I knew things were bad in the tax havens, but not this bad. I'll risk their wrath on copyright: it's worth it. Take this table as an example of how bad things are:

There's a clear and simple message from this: you can money launder at will in these places and have no risk of being prosecuted at all.

And the Report supports that view. It says, referring to the Table above:

Figure 9 shows that, at least in the smaller financial centres, the number of reports is so low as to indicate that some financial institutions either do not know or monitor their customers sufficiently or are unaware of their obligations to report.

That's not just in the small centres though: as I've shown not one of these Suspicious Activity Reports in Jersey related to money laundering. Despite the fact that $500 billion of the funds held there are related to tax evasion - which is corruption by the definition of their own money laundering handbook.

These places are, to put it quite simply, havens for fraud. And now we have the evidence that the UK knows it. And is not planning to do anything about it.

Why not?