“in helping criminals and looters hide their fortunes”

Oh, as you were.

in reality, though, the UK is the world’s worst money-laundry, but because its laundering activities are spread out over its overseas territories — taken as a whole, the UK leads the world in helping criminals and looters hide their fortunes.

https://boingboing.net/2018/02/13/1-6-trillion-per-year.html

Yeah, I was on a project to bring a lot of that “onshore” about 10 years ago.. Like it was ever going to happen but HMRC were insistent at the time that it should be tackled.. Yeah, like never gonna happen, and it hasn’t and it’s only getting worse.

Getting information from source is neigh on impossible, lawyers so powerful and influential that it’s increasing impossible to gain any information from holder or controller of an account. And those lawyers, yeah UK lawyers not your EU specialists, these guys are guilded Treasury specialists.

There is no hope of transforming anything to do with Offshoring and Secrecy when it comes to laundering money or offshoring it. Theres just not the appetite from either this, or any UK Government, since long before Major’s Chancellor encouraged shifting money offshore.. and you’ve got no hope of gaining any traction with the holder/controller of the account.

All this talk of FATCA (US Only, but a current biggy) is only highlighting a serious hole in the information trail, and quite how bad record keeping really is.

You can pile all the Laws on top of this all you like, it’s here to stay.. and only going to get worse as folks shift money around to retain as much as they can in the coming years…

Is this why on paper we appear to be a wealthy country but when you actually look around the towns and cities of the UK we look anything but?

only going to get worse as folks shift money around to retain as much as they can in the coming years

It’s ok, the EU are imposing new tax rules next year to try and prevent a lot of this, so we should be safe.

Er.  Oh.

The article is based on the incorrect assumption that the places listed are part of the UK. They are all independent self-governing overseas territories or crown dependencies with no control from Westminster.

😀

.

It’s a grey area whether thEy aren’t really part of us, but this is interesting:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41906470

even if they aren’t part of us we accidentally invented the conditions for this all to happen.

ooops

Yes but thankfully they are seriously cracking down on it by making it really hard for me to get a bank account opened on my return to the UK, tackling the big issues 😉

It’s ok, the EU are imposing new tax rules next year to try and prevent a lot of this, so we should be safe.
Er.  Oh.

i don’t think they would have made much difference to the behaviour of the Cayman Islands but don’t let that get in the way of a brexit dig eh?

id be interested to see if it affects the Swiss though, I strongly suggest not.

is offshoring money illegal?

isn’t money laundering all done by crypto currency nowadays?

edit; WTF kind of mess has someone made of this forum?