Offshore corruption exists. The veil of secrecy that it provides - that lead to me describing these places as secrecy jurisdictions - is designed to hide abuse, whether of tax law, regulation, creditors, partners and other people - or to facilitate crime. It has no other real purpose anyone has ever successfully explained.
Which makes the Guardian / BBC reports on the issue important for bringing this into the open. As the Guardian notes tonight:
Staff at agencies that set up companies in the UK and abroad have been filmed undercover, making it clear that nominee directors are regularly used as shams.
The startling footage is from a parallel investigation by BBC Panorama, to be broadcast late Monday.
In one section, an undercover reporter told James Turner of York-based Turner Little: "I've got this money in a Swiss bank and I haven't paid the tax on it. So what I need to do is get it out of there."
Turner suggested an offshore structure with a foundation in Belize: "It doesn't link back to you, it doesn't link back to your family. So it gives you complete confidentiality."
Nominee directors would be used, he said, because "they don't know who you are, they've never heard of you … They won't even know that they are a director, they just get paid … We have a stamp of the nominees' signatures. Which is kept in my safe. So the nominee never sees any paperwork at all."
And I know that the usual story that this is just the case of a 'rotten apple' will be rolled out.
Except it isn't. This is a rotten apple in a rotten orchard planted to obscure the truth that behind the trees there's corruption taking place.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
I’ll bite, is anything noted in the article illegal under UK law?
Yes, as the articles make clear
Triple-checked the article, no mention of anything being illegal.
If you really think the whole world evidence is in that one article then you’re remarkably narrow minded
Read the material as a whole
And you question is, anyway fatuous
Isn’t facilitating crime a crime in itself?
Tax evasion is a crime
Its getting very tedious, this invariable, immediate diversion of the central issue into “but it’s all perfectly legal”. Bit like Kenny Everett’s media tart simpering “it’s all in the best possible taste” while throwing her legs open at the camera. It’s lewd, is what it is, and simpering won’t alter that. We are being assaulted and robbed on a huge scale by organised criminality. If our laws are insufficient to deal with it, we do not need to hear wierd arguments that that somehow makes everything OK, somehow justifies the robber and the robbery.
Nor should we waste time tut-tutting about morality – that just makes the bad guys laugh. The only issues worth space, time or breath are adequate laws and adequate law enforcement.
Well said James.
Interesting how it is centred around some of the world’s lightest-regulated jurisdictions, ie Nevis, Mauritius, BVI and yes the UK.
This business got (rightly) driven out of Sark about 10 years ago and those involved simply relocated to far-flung jurisdictions. Interestingly, two (as yet unnamed) people were arrested in Sark last week following a raid by the Guernsey police and have been charged today with operating a fiduciary business without a licence.
You only have to pick up TheEconomist or inflight magazines of BritishAirways to see adverts by these sorts of incorporation agents who invariably give a UK address. Just investigate them one by one. Easy.