The patterns of elites who conceal their assets offshore

There was a documentary on Dutch TV a couple of years ago, about 'DYI tax haven management' for common people. Can't remember which public channel it was on, and what the name was. Might have been part of "Tegenlicht" series.

Update: Maybe it was the program Rambam where the makers set up their own tax haven based on the methods of the big corporations. Information in Dutch:

https://pers.bnnvara.nl/rambam-ontduikt-belasting-met-medewe...

No. Anyone can register a LLC in any of these places. They have minimal filing requirements going forward too.

You may be required to have a local agent, and they will add their address and names as the nominee shareholders so you remain anonymous. Then with an LLC, the company can open bank accounts and you can move money. Any money made offshore is non-taxed locally.

No different to Delaware.

There are 2 major reasons why people choose to use layers of corporations in other countries: tax minimization (in their domestic country) and obscurity of the assets-owners relationship.

The latter is used by corrupt politicians, oligarchs (extremely wealthy people who have massive influence on policy/politics), and to stifle investigations by civil investigations (divorce), to stifle criminal investigations (political corruption, sanctions avoidance, fences for thieves, a convenient vehicle for transactions or large assets so governments/ oversight can’t easily track them).

There is a minimum overhead required (you need at least a part time CPA and attorney to give you the strategy, more if they actually implement it), but I don’t think it requires you be ultra wealthy. The problem is that most law-abiding, non-sociopath people don’t benefit much from avoiding the law.

It's not one or the other, it's both. They both do original reporting on their own and act as a loose network of smaller investigative journalism organizations. It truly depends on the task at hand, but it's usually very useful to get some of the local investigative journalists involved, as they're the ones that both understand the language and are able to put the leaked data into context. Usually ICIJ is the one that publishes the English version of the story and their local partner(s) publish the same thing in the local language.

Actually, I'd say there's three such networks: ICIJ, GIJN and OCCRP. They're not really competitors, each serving slightly different purposes, and there's plenty of collaboration and overlap between their members.

Source: I'm not in that world anymore, but I knew about Panama Papers long before it was public and have my name in the credits in some of the collaborations with ICIJ.

True, but they also tend to be papers that can't consistently rely on advertising, precisely because of their investigations (publishing the deeds of corporate billionaires is a great way to not get ads placed for whatever the billionaire sells.)

So, at least subscribe to one of the papers !

(I know, sorry HN, I asked people to pay for a service that could be financed by ads to gather more data - aka more food for the algo. Sorry.)

> we should probably have something similar for software developers/IT people across Europe

what do you mean by that? support by doing data journalism? more like hacktivism?

Technically, if the VC and the startup is located in the blacklisted country i don't see why not. Basically we will start the torrent site like DNS witch hunt, but still possible. I assume the "elites" would not be too happy and do everything in their power to stop it?

They can leave, their assets can not.

"We don't pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes."

— Leona Helmsley

This is especially true if your wealth comes from capital markets.

If I buy a bunch of baseball cards at 1c each and later it turns out that the market values them at $100 each, I never actually "took" money from anyone. Yes it's patently unfair that I got that lucky, but it wasn't necessarily at anyone's expense.

Now, when I actually go to sell those cards then I do actually "take" money from someone else, but while those gains are unrealized it's just paper wealth.

In such a case it's also not clear who I am "taking" from. The person buying them off of me gave me the money, but you could also say the baseball card company was exploited and lost out on pricing their cards at $100?

Value can be created from nothing, I am sure you can give an example or two, but in general nothing large and valuable is created without the effort of a lot of people together, relying on the societal systems that are funded by taxes.

I suggest that you could count on one hand the number of people in the entire history of humanity who could and would hide this kind of wealth who didn't earn it through somehow relying on others and/or society's structure.

The planet's ressources are finite though. When you print money, you don't create value, since there's still the same amount of matter being traded around, you just reduce the value of everybody's money. And so you rob everybody.

Then why don't the uberwealthy focus on that instead of stealing from the public?

in fact value is created in every transaction: someone sells something for more money than it's worth to them and someone buys the thing for less money than the thing is worth to them (otherwise the transaction would not occur)

I'm not sure what you mean, do you mean resources aren't finite?

Value “creation” and money supply have nothing to do with each other.

But value creation isn't the point of taxes?

What does this mean? What does it have to do with the comment you're replying to?

What's interesting about the Cayman Islands is that they are the 4th largest holder of U.S. debt, with $441 billion[1].

So USD flows into Cayman banks, and those banks need to do something with the massive amounts of money just sitting there. So what do they do? They buy U.S. Treasuries. And half a trillion dollars is just their holdings in U.S. debt, imagine how much more money is hidden in those accounts and invested in other assets.

1. https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...

It's a tax haven right up until, say, the us navy parks a fleet on their doorstep.

The recoil from the Trump graft machine will control the army.

None of this stuff is permanent.

Right, and let's face it, the ultra wealthy are not really known for their "family values" or their dedication to their children.

They'll provide them with financial support and that's where their relationship often ends.

Their loyalty is mainly to their wealth and status, everything else around them is "stuff" that merely exist to fulfill the goal of increasing profit.

I'm sure there are exceptions but I'm making a simple observations.

That’s my understanding of how modern money laundering works. Can’t move your money out of a particular bank due to regulations? Use it as collateral to loan money to any other entity you wish. Fancy.

I talked to someone recently who claimed to know someone personally with 16,000 metric tons of gold. He claims that there is waaay more gold than is officially on the books. Hard to believe… but maybe not. He claims that there is unbelievable wealth out there—many more hundred-billionaires than official stats hold. Ok. Who knows?

I've noticed some people have gotten into tricky money situations and forever after adopting "I won't let that happen again" mentality.

Lawsuits, divorces, taxes on unrealized income, taxes contested by another state, offshore earning complications, ...

The trauma of giant unexpected bills or losses can make people do ... things.

"So... Taxes?"

If we're talking about wealth not income, then no, not really. We don't usually think of asset seizure as "taxes". In other words, one "taxes" flows (like capital gains and wages) and "siezes" stocks (like bank deposits and equity).

"You seem to be positing that it's entirely expected and understandable"

I wasn't making value judgement, but yes, if you look at it with the assumption these wealthy individuals are cold, calculating, self-interested actors, then it's "expected and understandable" to me.

"That seems counterintuitive to me, at least."

I think you're using "intuitive" as a shorthand for "the way things ought to work in a righteous world", where I find incentives and disincentives to be a more intuitive way of understanding the world.

"wealthy individuals in well functioning systems should commit fraud to the detriment of the system that brought them their wealth"

To be fair, it's not necessarily fraudulent to have offshore accounts or to conceal your identity (it can certainly be depending on the circumstances). Technically I have an "offshore" account, I just happen to be living outside the US and a US citizen. I also use mechanisms to conceal my identity when registering domain names, for example. Is it the same thing, no, but these people might not technically be doing anything illegal.

It isn't necessarily true that those systems "brought them their wealth" either. Plenty of them likely inherited wealth that was accumulated long before the current systems were put in place (granted, it could very well have been accumulated illegitimately 300 years ago).

(Again, I'm not saying any of this is how the world should work, I'm trying to look at the world dispassionately and describe how things seem to be)

At the level of wealth we're discussing, these individuals probably have to think about "diversifying" among nation-states. Instead of worrying about whether to short the tech sector, they're worried about a country being invaded and the new puppet regime deciding to nationalize the hydroelectric dam they financed. Or they may be worrying about whether their country of residence will pass a law that the biggest national telcom must sell the government a majority stake (i.e., their share) at a government-mandated price denominated in an inflating currency... with expert bureaucratic efficiency.

So... no, not really taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia

Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia (née Vella; 26 August 1964 – 16 October 2017) was a Maltese writer, journalist, blogger and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta. She was known internationally for her investigation of the Panama Papers and subsequent assassination by a car bomb. Caruana Galizia focused on investigative journalism, reporting on government corruption, nepotism, patronage, and allegations of money laundering, links between Malta's online gambling industry and organized crime, Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme, and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. Caruana Galizia's national and international reputation was built on her regular reporting of misconduct by Maltese politicians and politically exposed persons.

Really? I seem to recall a certain journo that went in a whole person but came out in many smaller pieces. Journos are NOT untouchable.

Surely the expected number of protests and demonstrations in a country where you get whipped for doing so is zero?