Glencore, the FTSE 100 mining giant, is facing fresh questions about the way it conducts its business following a massive data leak called the ‘Paradise Papers’.
More than 120,000 people and companies have been named in 13.4 million files, many of them leaked from offshore law firm Appleby. The documents have been reviewed by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
The Paradise Papers document leak revealed more than 13.4 million internal documents on Sunday showing how major world players take advantage of offshore tax havens, including Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II’s private estate, media reports said on Monday. The leak, known as the Paradise Papers, comes more than a year after the Panama Papers, for which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing offshore banking practices of the world’s elite.
Offshore Shell Games 2017, a report by the US PIRG and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, outlined the extent to which Fortune 500 companies are using offshore financial centres and as a result legitimately avoiding taxes in the US on trillions of dollars of profit.
Overall, multinational corporations use tax havens to avoid an estimated $100 billion in federal income taxes each year. Every dollar in taxes that corporations avoid must be balanced by higher taxes on individuals, less public investments and services and more federal debt.
Indians seem to prefer Asian tax havens and not Switzerland, according to the bilateral foreign holdings data released by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), says an article in the Times of India.
Switzerland has always been infamous for storing most of the black money which is generated by evading tax. However, data suggests otherwise. About 53 percent of the offshore Indian wealth is kept in places within Asia such as Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Bahrain and Malaysia and only 31 percent of the Indians have their wealth stored in Swiss banks.
Trinidad & Tobago is the last remaining tax haven in the world, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The Paris-based body said the caribbean state is the sole "non-compliant" tax jurisdiction of a list of 15 regions it has complied, a statement many will view as controversial. It said that compared to last year, 13 jurisdictions have now become "largely compliant". Precisely, they are: Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Costa Rica, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, the Federated States of Micronesia, Lebanon, Nauru, Panama, Samoa, the United Arab Emirates and Vanuatu. According to the report, the Marshall Islands are "partially compliant".
Wealthy people are dodging even more tax than previously thought, according to new research.
Economist Gabriel Zucman and his co-authors Annette Alstadsaeter and Niels Johannesen, from the University of Copenhagen and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, matched the identities in both caches to tax records in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Their goal was “to correct global inequality statistics, so as to better capture the very rich.”
"Offshore", "tax haven" and more recently "Panama in the EU" are labels that Malta has done its best to shake off.
The Institute of Financial Services Practitioners (IFSP) said on Thursday that the a series of “sensationalist” media reports in parts of the international tabloid press, referred to as the “Malta Files” contain several inaccuracies and false statements.
“Maltese financial services practitioners operate within a legal and regulatory framework of the highest standards. Malta is a full member of the European Union and all its laws, including anti-money laundering rules, are fully aligned with European rules and best practice.
The EU’s fight against tax evasion is far from over. After a series of tax evasion scandals concerning European countries and companies in recent years, the NGO Oxfam on Monday published a 52-page report, which estimates €25 billion of banker money ended up in tax havens in 2015.
It means fewer funds are going into national budgets to pay for things like health care and education. The report probed Europe’s 20 largest banks and found that Luxembourg remains one of their most profitable tax havens.
