The Komisar Scoop » Govt/Politics

CORRUPTION: U.S. banks abetting corrupt regimes, probe finds

Lucy Komisar — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:14:41 +0000

Inter Press Service (IPS), Feb 3, 2010 - The global bank HSBC may be running offshore accounts for central banks. According to a U.S. Senate investigation, an HSBC subsidiary in London called HSBC Equator Bank had a sister bank in the Bahamas. According to an internal e-mail, the bank told HSBC USA it had been providing offshore accounts to central banks for 20 years, because the banks wanted to avoid "Mareva" injunctions, legally enforceable orders to freeze funds.

Former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, GOP Candidate for NJ Governor, gets $ from IDT, NJ telcom investigated by Justice Dept for bribing Haitian officials

Lucy Komisar — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:22:17 +0000

Oct 22, 2009 - Back in 2004, when Chris Christie was the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, his office first heard allegations that IDT Corporation, a Newark, N.J.-based global telecommunications company, was involved in a case of international bribery. No federal criminal case was ever brought against IDT, in contrast to several successful federal prosecutions in similar cases elsewhere. The company is run by James Courter, a former Republican congressman from New Jersey. Fast forward to the present, and Christie is now the Republican candidate for the governor of New Jersey. And, an examination of campaign finance records shows, Christie has thus far racked up $26,800 in campaign contributions – earning him a total of $80,400 including state matching funds — from 27 individuals who could have a direct interest in the IDT case.

Q&A: Tax Havens, Bank Secrecy, and Tricks

Lucy Komisar — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:26:51 +0000

Inter Press Service (IPS), July 14, 2009 - At a recent conference in Miami organised by Offshore Alert, a specialised media organisation focused on financial crime, IPS sat down with veteran investigator Bob Roach to discuss the hurdles facing regulators trying to crack down on tax havens, which cost the U.S. alone an estimated 100 billion dollars annually.

Exclusive: Florida banking agency helped Stanford set up unregulated office to sell his phony CDs

Lucy Komisar — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 16:18:26 +0000

State aided suspect in huge swindle

Miami Herald, July 5, 2009 -

Winner of second place for Business News, the National Headliner Awards Years before his banking empire was shut down in a massive fraud case, Allen Stanford swept into Florida with a bold plan: entice Latin Americans to pour millions into his ventures — in secrecy.

From a bayfront office in Miami in 1998, he planned to sell investments to customers and send their money to Antigua.

But to pull it off, he needed unprecedented help from an unlikely ally: The state of Florida would have to grant him the right to move vast amounts of money offshore — without reporting a penny to regulators. He got it.

OECD Tax Havens Deal Falls Short, Critics Say

Lucy Komisar — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:10:31 +0000

Inter Press Service (IPS), May 8, 2009 - Jeffrey Owens, the tax "point person" of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), was stung by activist critics of the OECD standards under which countries will be put on a tax haven blacklist and targeted for sanctions. The blacklist was announced last month at the London meeting of the G20, which said in a communiqué that it would "take action against non-cooperative jurisdictions, including tax havens...to deploy sanctions to protect our public finances and financial systems." Key civil society criticisms are that the OECD standards require bilateral agreements for information on request, not automatic multilateral tax information exchange; that they call for only 12 such agreements to be signed by each tax haven; and that getting off the blacklist entails only promises, which have not been kept by tax havens in the past.

IRS on the Track of Tax-Cheating “John Doe’s”

Lucy Komisar — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:08:41 +0000

Inter Press Service (IPS), April 30, 2009 - The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is hitting pay dirt with a novel legal tactic designed to catch tax evaders. And it's going to use it to force international banks to give up the names of tax cheats. It's called the "John Doe" summons. Using "John Doe" means the IRS doesn't know the names of the suspected tax evaders. So it sends a summons to a bank or credit card company that says, "Give us the names and account information of all your U.S. clients with secret offshore accounts." Daniel Reeves, an IRS agent in charge of the tax agency's offshore compliance initiative, afforded an unusual look into the broad swath of projects that seek tax-cheating "John Doe's" every place from accounts of the giant Swiss bank UBS to the records of Pay Pal.

Tax Havens in Spotlight at G20 Meet

Lucy Komisar — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:32:29 +0000

Inter Press Service (IPS), March 29, 2009 - This could be the moment when a fatal blow is delivered to the world's tax havens. Or it could be another largely cosmetic change that allows offshore financial centres such as Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein to deflect attacks on the system by sacrificing the few tax miscreants that governments catch in their nets. Decisions at the G20 government leaders meeting in London Apr. 2 will set the direction. Offshore centres, worried what may happen in London, are falling all over themselves promising to cooperate with the major powers on the trail of tax cheats. But the holes in the tax havens' promises are as big as those in Switzerland's famous cheese. Many believe that automatic exchange of information is the only really effective way to end pandemic tax evasion. Some very good proposals are made in a leaked French paper which is linked to the full story.

Cafeteria Kickbacks

Lucy Komisar — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:57:56 +0000

How food-service providers like Sodexo bilk millions from taxpayers and customers

In These Times, March 2009 - The Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute provided generous support for this article. At the end of the 2006 school year, children’s nutrition advocate Dorothy Brayley had a disturbing conversation with a local dairy representative. He had come to her office to discuss participation in the summer trade show of food providers she runs as director of Kids First Rhode Island. At the time, the state’s schools were buying 100,000 containers of milk each week. The salesman for Garelick Farms, New England’s largest dairy, told Brayley that Sodexo—a food and facility management corporation that managed most of the state’s school lunch programs—was paying Garelick more than competitors in order to get a bigger rebate. That’s just a taste of the hundreds of millions of dollars of “rebates”—or kickbacks from suppliers—that Sodexo, a $20 billion-a-year global leader in the food and facility management industry, has taken while operating cafeterias and other facilities for schools, hospitals, universities, government agencies, the military and private companies across the country, according to evidence provided by whistleblowers and internal company documents.

Offshore tax cheating could become criminal money-laundering offense

Lucy Komisar — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 22:33:43 +0000

Feb 11, 2009 - The U.S. government might finally get a powerful tool against offshore tax evasion by mega-wealthy individuals and corporations. The worst most miscreants face now is negotiated pay-ups years after they are caught. A bill introduced last week by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) would make tax evasion using international transfers a criminal money-laundering offense. The law aims at cases in which money passes through tax havens. It targets not just the evaded taxes, but any money that is part of the scam.

Is NY Gov. Paterson protecting corporate tax evaders?

Lucy Komisar — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:48:12 +0000

Feb 8, 2009 - At a time when New York State's budget is reeling from Wall Street tax losses -- Wall Street pays 20 to 30 percent of revenues -- you'd think Governor David Paterson would want to recoup all the evaded taxes he could get. That doesn't seem to be the case when it comes to corporations that launder their profits offshore. Paterson refused to deal with the issue and instead answered a question I hadn’t asked. I wonder why. Does that mean he won't go after corporate tax evaders? Here is the exchange from the Council’s transcript of David Patterson meeting.