When the devastating earthquake hit Haiti in January, IDT, 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.
One year ago, a group of financial institutions quietly launched ICE Trust, a new and theoretically safer way to trade derivatives, a key element of the financial crisis. As lawmakers debate reform, banks at the center of the storm are remaking the market”and stand to profit.
As the financial crisis exploded with full force in 2008, it was obvious that something was gravely wrong with the huge, unregulated market for derivatives.
Lehman Brothers had $738 billion of these contracts”which are based on the value of some other asset, such as a stock or a bond or a hog belly”on its books when it failed on September 14, 2008.
Lehman certainly wasn‘t alone. Over the next few months, insurer AIG reported as much as $53.5 billion of derivatives losses”losses that were linked to nearly one third of its $182.5 billion federal
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.
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 a Noble subsidiary in Zurich was doing work that it pretended to contract to a fake company in Bermuda, the subsidiary might have to pay Swiss taxes. This story has not been reported before.
What follows are the heretofore secret details about how Noble, and global companies like it, use legitimate lawyers and accounting firms to create the fake structures used to cheat on taxes around the world. This story has not been reported before.
The Zurich company was called Noble Investments SA, Zurich (NISA). The Bermuda company was called Noble Investments Ltd. (NIL).
The Noble Group is the world‘s second-largest commodities trading and logistics company, after Cargill. It specializes in energy, agriculture, mining and minerals. It is listed on the Singapore stock exchange (NOBG.SI).
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.
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.
Winner of the Gerald Loeb award, the most important prize in financial journalism
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
President Barack Obama said he would crack down on firms that use offshore centres to evade taxes. He could begin with a New York subsidiary of one of the world’s largest private banks, which used a Cayman Islands company to shift its profits.
Why would a New York investment fund manager run operations through an office in the Caymans? This type of structure is for optimising taxes, explained Max Obrist, a Cayman Islands official of the global Julius Baer Group (Zurich).
He told IPS that generating the income where a company was actually based, you would pay much more taxes. Obrist was describing a company shifting claimed earnings to tax havens to evade home taxes. He allegedly helped Julius Baer Investment Management (JBIM) New York do just that.
U.S. Senators at Timothy Geithner’s confirmation hearing for Treasury Secretary Wednesday may want to ask him about a failure to act that is costing the U.S. a lot more than the amount he evaded on taxes.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which he has led since 2003, conducts the operations on Wall Street of the Federal Reserve in Washington, the country’s central bank.
The New York Fed under Geithner’s presidency has failed to stop massive naked short selling of U.S. Treasury bonds that threatens the stability of the market and sale of the bonds.
Ironically, the scam, enabled by a lack of regulation at the behest of Wall Street brokerage houses, makes it more expensive for the U.S. to bail out those same financial institutions.
Gordon Brown and Barack Obama are both promising to crack down on the use of offshore tax havens. But putting those tough words into practice is another matter.
One of the world’s biggest private wealth management groups circulates funds via offices in the Cayman Islands, claiming they take major investment decisions ” when the main work is apparently carried out in London.
With offices in London and across the globe, Swiss-based Julius Baer banking group invests over $300 billion ( £208 billion) in assets on behalf of institutions and wealthy individuals. Profits in 2007 were more than $1.1 billion.
In London, one of its units was known as Julius Baer Investors or Julius Baer Investment Management (JBIM) until a management buyout in 2007. It was renamed Augustus Asset Managers, is based in Bevis Marks in the City, and is still 10% owned by Julius Baer.
From London, Augustus controls assets of $12 billion but claims its profits are generated elsewhere, offshore at a Cayman Islands Baer subsidiary called Baer Select Management.
Why? Simple, really. “If you would generate all the income in London, you would pay much more taxes,” acknowledged Max Obrist, a Cayman Islands executive of Julius Baer.
The financial crisis has the U.S. swirling with charges about the immoral greed of some corporate executives who recklessly bet their companies’ futures to line their own pockets. The popular fix for this international calamity stops at the nation’s borders: decouple top-line salaries and bonuses from stock prices and institute more transparency and regulation.
However, last month, the Vatican, in a groundbreaking statement, linked the financial crisis to a much deeper problem largely ignored in discussions of the crisis here. It underlined the need to consider carefully the hidden but crucial role of the offshore financial system in light of the emergence of the global financial crisis.
The Vatican now gets it, but U.S. corporations don’t. The U.S.-based multinationals that signed on to yet another ethics pledge included General Electric, The Hartford, Pepsi, Wal-Mart, Accenture, Dell, and United Airlines. Their ethics, according to their pledge, does not include rejecting the use of the offshore system to evade regulation as well as taxes.
American International Group (AIG) operated a captive insurance scam that involved fraudulent use of offshore tax havens. Currently, the U.S. government has invested over $40 billion in AIG, with the U.S. getting nearly 80 percent of its stock.
This puts the U.S. in a unique position to investigate the internal operations of a giant corporation with a reputation for using the offshore system for tax evasion.
U.S. authorities could begin their investigations with a look into a very curious practice that was revealed 15 years ago in a case that was never exposed by the mainstream press and which insurance insiders say is endemic.
AIG would keep a portion of a client’s inflated insurance premium and send the rest to the client’s offshore reinsurance company. AIG would earn a higher commission. The client would write off the entire amount as a business expense and enjoy the extra cash offshore, tax free.
This story tells how notorious fraudster Victor Posner made an AIG deal to stash reinsurance profits in Bermuda.
From alleged kickbacks to Aristide to a company that’s tanking.
Jim Courter, the former New Jersey Republican Congressman who quit as a McCain national finance co-chair after IDT, the global telecommunications company he heads, was fined $1.3 million by the Federal Communications Commission, now has much bigger problems. IDT announced Friday that Courter will quit the company. IDT‘s filing with the SEC the same day shows the company in a free fall. Its stock is tanking, and the New York Stock Exchange has threatened to delist it.
The FCC fine imposed for IDT‘s failure to file its contract with Haiti was first reported by the author in July. The contract revealed that IDT was sending Haiti fees to a Turks & Caicos shell company instead of to a Haiti Teleco account. A whistleblower charged kickbacks.
The company said Courter would leave as CEO when his contract expires next October. In the meantime, his 2009 salary will be paid entirely in stock, which he cannot cash in till his departure. That could mean paltry pickings. IDT stock has fallen to 69 cents from more than $24 in 2004 and $1.93 in June.
IDT could be in for some more trouble with the FCC if a new administration decides to enforce its regulations. According to FCC responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, IDT has never filed its contracts with any of the 140 major international carriers to which it claims to supply service. This violation could bring fines of $7,000 a day for each case, but the agency has given the company a pass on obeying its rules.
Articles I wrote this month about the resignation of IDT CEO James Courter as John McCain‘s finance co-chair provoked supporters of former Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to noisy denials and personal attacks.
I wrote that Courter had resigned after I reported that the Federal Communications Commission had fined IDT $1.3 million for failing to file its contract with Haiti.
Why would IDT fail to file the contract? Maybe because it shows that in this Aristide-administration deal, payments were below the legal 23 cents a minute set by the FCC (money that would have gone to Haiti) and that IDT payments were ordered sent to a shell company account in the Turks & Caicos instead of to a government account in Haiti.
It sounded like the plot of an action thriller. A U.S. Senate subcommittee held hearings Thursday on how UBS/Switzerland, the world’s largest private bank, and LGT (Liechtenstein Global Trust), owned by the royal family of that micro-tax-haven state, organised complex tax evasion schemes for U.S. clients, and used spy-type tactics to avoid being detected.
LGT bankers allegedly used code names and public phones instead of making calls that could be traced. UBS agents carried encrypted laptops and business cards that didn’t mention they were in the wealth management division. According to testimony and records, both banks took care to disguise their activities because moving and hiding the money of tax evaders and other criminals is very lucrative, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.
Condé-Nast Portfolio, July 16, 2008 – Code names, secretive European royalty, encrypted computers. A spy novel? Nope. Nope. It’s how two European banks helped rich Americans duck the taxman, a Senate probe found.
The Newport regatta has always drawn America’s moneyed class, and the Art Basel show in Miami is hot on the nouveau riche circuit”making both glitzy venues ideal for financial giants to prospect for new clients.
But UBS, one of the world’s largest banks, had another goal in mind when it shelled out money for the UBS Regatta Cup in Newport or the Art Basel Art Fair in Miami, or performances in major U.S. cities by the UBS Vervier Orchestra.
Jim Courter, one of Senator John McCain’s top fundraisers, has resigned from the McCain campaign just days after Lucy Komisar reported on portfolio.com that Courter’s company had been fined by regulators.
The Federal Communications Commission last week levied a fine of $1.3 million against IDT, a New Jersey telecommunications company headed by Courter, for failing to disclose its 2003-04 long-distance phone agreements with Haiti.
The FCC hits James Courter’s IDT with a $1.3M fine for a cloudy deal in Haiti.
IDT, the New Jersey telecommunications outfit run by one of John McCain’s top fundraisers, Jim Courter, was fined $1.3 million by the Federal Communications Commission for failing to file a contract for telephone service to Haiti in 2004.
Courter, a former New Jersey Republican congressman, is one of 20 McCain national finance co-chairs, and joined the campaign in February 2007. He’s a Trailblazer for McCain, meaning he raised at least $100,000. The IDT PAC has contributed $84,850 in 2008.
IDT‘s work with Haiti has been put under scrutiny since a former employee, Michael Jewett, then IDT’s manager for the Caribbean, sued the company. His suit claims he was fired when he balked at negotiating a scheme that routed a portion of the company’s long distance revenue from Haiti calls to a shell company, Mount Salem in the Turks & Caicos, which he was told was owned by then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Tony Defries, the rock manager who launched David Bowie and who takes credit for managing, marketing and branding such rock stars as Lou Reed and John Mellencamp as well as being “present at the birth of Madonna [and] the reincarnation of Stevie Wonder,” might be making some headlines of his own soon. (He is shown here in 1972 with Bowie’s wife Angie on his right.)
The ex-impresario, a Brit who now lives in Los Angeles and who for a promoter is unaccountably interview- and camera-shy, was one of the beneficiaries of a fake annuity scheme organized by a Swiss bank and its partner, a pseudo insurance company whose main product seems to be tax evasion. But the benefit turned out to be a disaster.
Twenty years ago, on a campaign trip in rural Pakistan in October 1987, Benazir Bhutto told me of her concern about the long-term effect of Afghan refugees who had set up safe houses, stored munitions and created networks in her country.
We talked for an hour in an interview I videotaped. It was the day after I traveled with her on a political procession in Sailkot, in the Punjab, northern Pakistan, where she was mobbed by supporters.
She was prescient about the impact of the Islamic Afghanis who had arrived in Pakistan during the war with the Soviet-supported government.
She said a long-term domestic fallout would be that even if Afghanistan today is solved and guaranteed by both superpowers, what about the future? Because the network has been created.
Code names, secretive European royalty, encrypted computers. A spy novel? Nope. Nope. It’s how two European banks helped rich Americans duck the taxman, a Senate probe found.
