By Lucy Komisar
Oct 16, 2020
On The Backstory October 15th, I talked about the film “The Spider’s Web: Britain‘s Second Empire” about how in the 1960s the Brits took Swiss bank secrecy of the 1930s and expanded it to enable money-laundering by The City of London, the protected British banking cutout which operates independently from the government. The City runs the British international tax haven system based in such British crown colonies as the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, which enables criminal operations, intelligence agency arms trafficking and assaults on governments, and tax cheating by corporations and the mega-rich.
I discussed how the Americans copied and expanded that, driving the get-away cars for criminals and tax cheats, with details about BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, linked to the Democrats (through insider lawyer Clark Clifford) and the Bushes. And how Obama in 2016 supported a reform shot through with loopholes that showed his subservience to the money-laundering big banks. It was never enacted.
And of course the posterchild for offshore tax evasion protected by the UK and the U.S. is conman William Browder, once a U.S. citizen, now with a UK passport, who used shell companies to launder the profits he looted from Russia without paying taxes on them. See the evidence.