Offshore corruption exists.\u00a0The veil of secrecy that it provides - that lead to me describing these\u00a0places\u00a0as\u00a0secrecy jurisdictions - is designed to hide abuse, whether of tax law,\u00a0regulation, creditors, partners and other people - or to facilitate crime. It has no other real purpose anyone has ever successfully explained.<\/p>\n
Which makes the Guardian \/ BBC reports on the issue important for bringing this into the open. As the Guardian notes tonight<\/a>:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The startling footage is\u00a0from a parallel investigation by BBC Panorama<\/a>, to be broadcast late Monday.<\/p>\n 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.\"<\/p>\n 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.\"<\/p>\n Nominee directors would be used, he said, because \"they don't know who you are, they've never heard of you \u2026 They won't even know that they are a director, they just get paid \u2026 We have a stamp of the nominees' signatures. Which is kept in my safe. So the nominee never sees any paperwork at all.\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And I know that the usual\u00a0story\u00a0that this is just the case of a 'rotten apple' will be rolled out.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Offshore corruption exists.\u00a0The veil of secrecy that it provides – that lead to me describing these\u00a0places\u00a0as\u00a0secrecy jurisdictions – is designed to hide abuse, whether of
Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,80,55,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-secrecy-jurisdictions","category-tax-evasion","category-tax-havens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}