topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Thursday March 28, 2024, 1:18 pm
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Author Topic: Bigger than Wikileaks - ICIJ obtains 200GB of data on offshore money havens  (Read 5713 times)

40hz

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 11,857
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
There's a new posse in town it seems. A group called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has obtained over 2.5 million files with detailed confidential information on over 120,000 offshore money accounts. Accounts with estimated assets totaling somewhere between $20 and $32 trillion dollars.

The information in this info haul raises serious questions about exactly what sort of business is being conducted by banks in the British Virgin Islands. Because it seems that this well organized and secretive banking industry is the go to place for government officials, former dictators, large banks, multinationals, hyper-wealthy individuals, and pretty much anybody else with huge amounts of money, if they want to hide it. Or make their financial transactions extremely difficult to trace.

Full ICIJ write-up here.

Interesting reading...

Which also raises another question: Isn't this the exact same thing some governments are going after Wikileaks for? :-\
« Last Edit: April 03, 2013, 11:25 PM by 40hz »

Tinman57

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • ***
  • Posts: 1,702
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
There's a new posse in town it seems. A group called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has obtained over 2.5 million files with detailed confidential information on over 120,000 offshore money accounts. Accounts with estimated assets totaling somewhere between $20 and $32 trillion dollars.

The information in this info haul raises serious questions about exactly what sort of business is being conducted by banks in the British Virgin Islands. Because it seems that this well organized and secretive banking industry is the go to place for government officials, former dictators, large banks, multinationals, hyper-wealthy individuals, and pretty much anybody else with huge amounts of money, if they want to hide it. Or make their financial transactions extremely difficult to trace.

Full ICIJ write-up here.

Interesting reading...

Which also raises another question: Isn't this the exact same thing some governments are going after Wikileaks for? :-\ 

  Careful now, some have lost their lives for exposing smaller things than this.   :o

  Besides, you know this is a hot topic for Renny.   :P

40hz

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2007
  • **
  • Posts: 11,857
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member

  Careful now, some have lost their lives for exposing smaller things than this.   :o

  Besides, you know this is a hot topic for Renny.   :P

Yeah. I think the stakes in something like this are considerably higher for the whistle blower. :tellme:

And I sorta posted this for Renny so he'd have something to chew on. It gets too quiet when he's not around because he's too busy market timing his bitcoin portfolio. ;D

kyrathaba

  • N.A.N.Y. Organizer
  • Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • Posts: 3,200
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
Ren? You gonna comment?  :P

IainB

  • Supporting Member
  • Joined in 2008
  • **
  • Posts: 7,540
  • @Slartibartfarst
    • View Profile
    • Read more about this member.
    • Donate to Member
This is good news. I read about it in a post by Guido Fawkes:
(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
A Tip-Off For the Guardian Investigations Team
April 4th, 2013

Today’s Guardian splashes on millions of leaked emails revealing the “secrets of the super-rich” using offshore tax havens to hide vast sums of money from the Exchequer. One company was missing from the list: GMG Hazel Acquisition 1 Limited, registered and still active on the Cayman Islands. The last time Guido asked the company’s owners, Guardian Media Group, for an explanation he was told their spokesperson was, er, abroad. When Guido asked Liz Forgan of the Scott Trust what was going on, she tried to blame it on Apax, GMG’s investment partner. Even Alan Rusbridger promised to look in to it, making a note of the company name on his phone.

Always one to help their journalists get to the bottom of the mystery, Guido suggests the Guardian’s investigations team take a look at the following:

    If GMG Hazel Acquisition 1 Limited holds no assets, why have its owners continued to pay registration fees since 2007 so it can remain an active company?
    If it does hold assets what is the total present value of GMG and associated companies’ assets held via the Cayman Islands or other offshore tax havens?
    Does GMG Hazel Acquisition 1 Limited have “sham” nominee directors, if so, who are they?

If they could answer these questions, now that would be a great story…
There's nothing new about these tax-havens. What does seem to be new is the dump of account-holder details.
I read that something similar happened some years back, regarding the publication of "Anonymous" Swiss bank accounts of deceased German Jews and German Nazis officials that the Swiss banks didn't want to be published (for fear of having to make restitution of assets to their descendants or government(s).

"The rule of thumb is that, if a business process can not stand the hard light of scrutiny, then there is probably something unethical about it". - Sir Adrian Cadbury (Chairman of the then Quaker family-owned Cadbury's) in his prize-winning article on Business Ethics for Harvard Business Review circa 1984.

Renegade

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 13,288
  • Tell me something you don't know...
    • View Profile
    • Renegade Minds
    • Donate to Member
Ren? You gonna comment?  :P

Been a bit busy lately, but yes. ;) (And don't say nobody asked for it~! :P )

And I sorta posted this for Renny so he'd have something to chew on. It gets too quiet when he's not around because he's too busy market timing his bitcoin portfolio. ;D

Chew? That requires molars. Get ready for fangs... ;)

And yes - been a bit busy with BTC. ;D Woohoo~! It's a thrilling ride~!  :Thmbsup:



The entire premise here is simply hosed. Completely off-base and only exposing a small symptom of the disease that has infected business, commerce, finance, and the bitch lackeys... government.

This is a symptom of a collectivist system where the middle class is attacked and destroyed with demonic fury. The poor are made poorer, and the rich are made richer.

Small and medium sized businesses are nothing but cattle for the vampires to feed on. The large enterprises purchase legislation to allow them to suck the life out of their "human resources" (note the dehumanizing use of "resource" -- you are NOT human, you are just a slave, a resource to be used and discarded) as they consolidate power into mega-enterprises. e.g. There are now only about 5 banks in the US worth mentioning.

By destroying the middle class and installing a system of dependency, the poor are forced to vote for ever increasingly "socialist" tyrants that strive to control every facet of life. The irony is that for the large mega-enterprises, they get all the wonderful pork of fascism to feed off of, while when they screw up in gargantuan ways, they flip to the other tit and suck on socialism for the rich in the form of bailouts and corporate welfare as they award their CEOs and executives obscene bonuses that would make Mammon blush.

What does this have to do with off-shore wealth? Everything.

The system is vampiric. It siphons the blood of the working poor and the diminishing middle class into the voracious and insatiable greed of the rich and elite. However, with all that money, what is one to do? Create a trust and funnel money out of the country into a safe haven so that it is safe from the very vampiric system that they have created.

Is it any surprise to see? Of course not. Why put your sheep in the same pen that you plan to unleash your pack of wolves into? That would be idiotic. Of course you move your money out of reach of the very corruption that you created to gain your wealth.

What can the little guy do?

BUY SILVER & GOLD

Silver and gold are excellent stores of wealth. However, they are being artificially depressed.

JP Morgan shorts silver on paper to drive the price down. They have orders of magnitude more silver on paper than exist on the planet, both above and below ground.

The Fed is now shorting gold to prop up the value of the US dollar. This is a symptom of a system on the verge of collapse. BRICs and other countries are abandoning the US petro dollar. The USD will no longer be the world reserve currency. It's effectively dead right now.

BUY BITCOINS

I know that a lot of people don't really think much of bitcoin, but it is a better system than having a monopolized currency that is regularly manipulated for the benefit of the elite.

If you don't know what quantitative easing is, it's a fancy word for "theft". The current rounds (that's PLURAL) of QE haven't really hit the markets yet. They are massive and perpetual. They will destroy what is left of the USD, driving real wealth into the hands of the elite, bankrupting the middle class, and forcing the working poor into working abject poverty.

Silver & bitcoin are great ways to take your money out of the corrupt system and store your money/wealth. They exist out of reach of the thieving grubby paws of governments that have mismanaged and bankrupted cities, states, provinces, prefects, and entire countries.



THE LEAK

For the actual "leak" side of this...

Nothing will happen.

There will be bitching and complaining. A couple minor thugs might be slapped on the wrist, but there will be exactly ZERO consequences meted out.

Sure, the sheeple will bleat their dissatisfaction.

So what? When has public opinion mattered to government? Pot is still illegal in Canada while the majority of Canadians want it decriminalized.

Government is violence.

We'll read opinion pieces about how horrible it is. And all the other news articles will talk about "tax evasion" and how it's not right...

No. They COMPLETELY miss the point.

TAX IS THEFT

It's not "tax evasion", it's "protecting your money from being stolen".

You don't all of a sudden magically get the right to steal from someone simply because you're in a big mob. Tax is theft.

"You can't steal, but *we* can steal." Ahem... please imagine a good deal of profanity, vulgarity, obscenity coming from my foaming mouth.

Complaining about "tax evasion" is like bitching about how you just got raped, everyone else should get raped.

BEING BORN doesn't automatically give other people the right to the fruits of your labour. Being born doesn't indenture you to a monarch (or council or government) who somehow magically claims you as their property by virtue of the lineage of their own birth (or incorporation).

The Queen in (so tempted to type 'F' here) Buckingham Palace has no legitimate authority or moral authority over anyone. Yet, she is the largest land owner in the world.

Government should SERVE people. Not the other way around.

I could go on for pages and pages and megabytes and gigabytes and terabytes about this stuff.



And... I didn't use the F-bomb once. You have no idea how difficult that was... ;)

Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

Renegade

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 13,288
  • Tell me something you don't know...
    • View Profile
    • Renegade Minds
    • Donate to Member
tl;dr - summary

This will be used by the media to brainwash people further into believing that it is their moral and civic duty to STFU when the government forcibly takes their money from them, aka steals from them.

Just watch... People will scream about how it's not fair that other people don't get raped as badly as them...

Crabs in a bucket... Just the way the system was intended to be...
Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

kyrathaba

  • N.A.N.Y. Organizer
  • Honorary Member
  • Joined in 2006
  • **
  • Posts: 3,200
    • View Profile
    • Donate to Member
A more perfect quote I have never seen:

The irony is that for the large mega-enterprises, they get all the wonderful pork of fascism to feed off of, while when they screw up in gargantuan ways, they flip to the other tit and suck on socialism for the rich in the form of bailouts and corporate welfare as they award their CEOs and executives obscene bonuses that would make Mammon blush.

Renegade

  • Charter Member
  • Joined in 2005
  • ***
  • Posts: 13,288
  • Tell me something you don't know...
    • View Profile
    • Renegade Minds
    • Donate to Member
A more perfect quote I have never seen:

I did try to entertain at the same time~! :D

But no reaction? Busy weekend, or did I just *scare* people? :P ;D
Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker