ICIJ Offshore Leaks http://www.icij.org/offshore

ICIJ Offshore Leaks database https://offshoreleaks.icij.org

http://we.tl/zpt4CNFi9n

Apologies for the massive file, it’s 60mb worth of names/addresses from all over the world and I do not have the time to filter out the Maltese/Gozitan names for you so…happy reading!

(For DCG : Can’t risk putting my own e-mail, my apologies)

[Daphne – No need to be dramatic. That’s Offshore Leaks information which the ICIJ released almost two years ago, and which has been publicly available on the organisation’s site ever since. I’ve noticed that quite a few people here in Malta are confusing the two – Swiss Leaks – largely because the Offshore Leaks passed the Maltese press by in general and is being noticed here in Malta only now. Most of the names on that list are of financial intermediaries.]

“You should be aware of different options that exist to attenuate the economic effect of this tax,” said Colin Wyss, then chief operating officer of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse), and Denis Soussi, the bank’s head of tax, in a letter to clients in February 2005.”

……..

In December, a federal judge authorized the Internal Revenue Service to issue summonses to HSBC Bank USA and several package-courier services to identify U.S. taxpayers who “may be evading” federal taxes by using the offshore consulting firm of Sovereign Management & Legal Ltd, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Some U.S. taxpayers may have used Sovereign to set up anonymous companies in Panama and elsewhere to “conceal their foreign assets,” federal prosecutors said.”

…….

FDI/ Finance Malta: Let’s all pretend we have nothing to do with this.

Who better than the designer of the law to exploit the loopholes?

Definition of cartels as applied to financial institutions and legislation fixing?

I’m interested in the “so far.”

Does that mean that there may have been other reasons, for example, as to why HSBC got Mid Med?

Now we’re into trajectories in full blown “poetry.”

As long as the end word hits a familiar chord,
the rest of it doesn’t need to make any sense.

One man’s jackpot the other’s crackpot.

The so-called Lagarde list is known by that name because the French government had passed on the information about Greek citizens to the Greek government.

Lagarde was finance minister in France at the time, hence ‘Lagarde list’. Lagarde herself had nothing to do with releasing the information to the media.

Offshore Leaks was a separate ICIJ investigation based on another set of data from a different source.

Money laundering too, I guess.

You can bet your last drachma that the recent amnesty on undeclared investments had something to do with this. Some really big cats must have had an inkling, and of course, the Ministry of Finance complied.

Daphne – I assume that any politician on the confidential list would be regarded as a public-interest case and thus would have been exposed by the ICIJ. I make this assumption based on the premise that the primary reason for banking in Switzerland is tax avoidance. Please correct me if I’m labouring under some kind of misapprehension.

[Daphne – I wouldn’t know. I only know the answer journalists are being given when they ask for information.]