I recommend an article in the Observer today. It begins:
From selfies on super-yachts to posing with private jets, the young heirs of the uber-wealthy have attracted worldwide envy and derision by flaunting their lavish lifestyles on social media.
But these self-styled rich kids of Instagram are, often unwittingly, revealing their parents' hidden assets and covert business dealings, providing evidence for investigators to freeze or seize assets worth tens of millions of pounds, and for criminals to defraud their families.
For years we have heard how the wealthy need anonymity to protect themselves from risk. But now their offspring are blowing it apart. Although, as I have always pointed out, unless the super wealthy were willing to live in modest houses in out of the way places and drive Ford Escorts with untinted windows they really never were very hard to identify. Conspicuous consumption has always outed most them. But what that means in combination is that the secrecy always had just one aim, which was cheating those who had a right to know about what they were doing in the entities that they controlled. It's ironic that it's Instagram that's tearing it apart.
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There’s nothing like youthful ego to get in the way of a good tax evasion plan by the old fogies!
I’m sure that HMRC are really on top of this trend and taking a global lead in developing cyber tax collecting techniques (once they’ve worked out what Instagram is of course!)
I can also see a new growth industry emerging in “online secrecy training” for the young whipper snappers who could put their parents ill gotten stashes at risk. I’m sure KPMG and others will already have spotted the opportunity for a new service line here!
I’m wondering whether it could be used as the basis for academic research…
Well, the Greeks and Italians got on top of tax evasion with Google Maps – they simply mapped all the houses that had private swimming pools visible, correlated the data and sent the inspectors in…
The ‘anonymity’ con always struck me as being particularly ironic in that those professing it was ‘freedom’ that enabled their richness couldn’t enable them to live open lives or even mingle with the proles.
Who needs Instagram when a whistleblower at a Panamanian law firm will do the job much better!
This story should run for a while and it will be interesting to see who the UK lords and MP’s are on the list.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/panama-papers-money-hidden-offshore
Agreed
I will comment in the morning
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