The Komisar Scoop » offshore

The Wall Street ICEcapade

Lucy Komisar — Wed, 19 May 2010 03:04:10 +0000

The American Interest, July-Aug 2010 (Online May 18, 2010) - As I write this, the U.S. Senate is debating a major financial reform bill in which the credit default swap, a kind of derivative, plays a significant part. An amendment to that bill, proposed by Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), would ban banks from proprietary trading. There are a lot of high-rolling bankers who do not want that amendment to pass, because it will mess up their plans to repatriate foreign profits into the United States, untaxed, by trading in derivatives on their own accounts. The clearinghouse ICE Trust U.S. forms a central part of these plans. What is ICE Trust U.S., and who owns it? ICE US Holding Co., which was established in 2008 as the parent of ICE Trust U.S., is located in the Cayman Islands. Yet none of the owners of ICE US Holding Co. are based in the Caymans. Among the owners of the Cayman’s company are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, which are headquartered in New York. Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch, is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

IDT’s Voodoo Economics: Inside Justice Dept’s probe of telecom bribes in Haiti

Lucy Komisar — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:38:28 +0000

The Big Money, March 11, 2010 When the devastating earthquake hit Haiti in January, IDT (IDTC), the New Jersey-based global phone company, moved fast to help. It announced it was setting up calling stations at hotels and other sites so Haitians could use its Internet calling-service to reach family and friends around the world. It cut rates on its U.S. prepaid calling-card to 2 cents a minute to Haiti (at least for 12 days), donated 4,000 $2-prepaid calling-cards to Haitian community groups in New York and Florida, and said it would give some proceeds from prepaid calls to Haitian Red Cross relief. Such a warm, fuzzy response from a U.S. corporation often wins plaudits, though, of course, IDT has a business interest in the impoverished island. In 2005, in its latest publicly available figures, the company reported $4 million in profits from $17 million in revenues for routing calls there.

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.

How multinational, aided by Ernst & Young, tried to launder profits & cheat on taxes through offshore Bermuda shell

Lucy Komisar — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:53:05 +0000

Jan 20, 2010 - In September 2004, David Beringer, the tax director of the $20-billion Noble Group based in Hong Kong, wrote a memo to company officials expressing concern that if Swiss officials discovered that employees of a Swiss subsidiary were doing work for a company that claimed to be operating out of Bermuda, the subsidiary might have to pay Swiss taxes. This story has not been reported before. He said, “In the disclosure to the Swiss tax authorities we have not advised that personnel working in Switzerland conclude NIL’s contracts for fees for products structure and portfolio performance; and NIL’s intermediary agreements.” NIL was a Bermuda shell company called Noble Investments Ltd. The document was provided by Rudolf Elmer (shown here), a German who worked for Noble Investments SA, Zurich (NISA), a hedge fund consultant, as operations manager from June 2003 to October 1, 2005.

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.

The Real AIG Scandal: How the Game is Rigged at Wall Street’s Casino

Lucy Komisar — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:36:24 +0000

AlterNet, March 26, 2009 - Congress has deftly avoided the real story of AIG's collapse, which will make a few million in bonuses seem like peanuts. Most legislators at a House Finance subcommittee hearing last week deftly avoided the real story of AIG's collapse. Instead, they homed in on the public relations disaster of hundreds of top AIG officials and staff getting $165 million (later revealed as over $218 million) in bonuses. The key issue ignored by the congressmen and women was the potential catastrophe represented by as much as $2.7 trillion in AIG derivative contracts and how AIG and the U.S. government are dealing with them. To put that number in context, we've so far provided the company only about $170 billion.