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The Panama Papers
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Old 04-04-2016, 12:20 PM
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The Panama Papers: Global Investigations Begin Following Damning Tax Haven Revelations

By Reuters and VICE News

April 4, 2016 | 1:20 pm

Global investigations have begun into the tax arrangements of rich and powerful people around the world, following a massive data leak from a Panama-based law firm which revealed a vast network of offshore companies set up for clients including world leaders.

The Australian Tax Office (ATO) said on Monday it was investigating more than 800 wealthy clients of Mossack Fonseca, the firm from whose files more than 11.5 million documents were leaked, and the British HM Revenue and Customs asked for a copy of the leaked data so it could "closely examine" the information and act on any possible tax evasion "swiftly and appropriately."

More than 70 current and former heads of state are among those implicated by the data, which was given to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) more than a year ago and then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and more than 100 other news organizations around the globe.

"Currently we have identified over 800 individual taxpayers and we have now linked over 120 of them to an associate offshore service provider located in Hong Kong," the Australian tax office said in a statement emailed to Reuters, which said it would work closely with the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Crime Commission and anti-money laundering regulator AUSTRAC to further cross-check the data from the documents. It did not name the Hong Kong company.

Related: The Panama Papers: Massive Leak Reveals the Global Elite's Secret Cash Havens

The 800 individuals under investigation include some taxpayers who had previously been investigated and others who had reported themselves to the tax office under a voluntary disclosure initiative, as well as a large number of taxpayers who had not previously come forward.

New Zealand's tax agency also said it was "working closely" with its tax treaty partners to obtain full details of any New Zealand tax residents who may have been involved in arrangements facilitated by Mossack Fonseca.

French President Francois Hollande said on Monday that his government would carry out its own investigations. "These revelations are good news because they will increase tax revenues from those who commit fraud," he told reporters as he visited a company in Paris' suburbs.

Sweden's Financial Supervisory Authority (FSA) said it had contacted authorities in Luxembourg to ask for information related to allegations that Swedish banking group Nordea helped some clients to set up accounts in offshore tax havens.

In Iceland, Prime Minister Sigmundur Davîo Gunnlaugsson is facing calls to step down due to the revelation he co-owned a shell company with his wife that stored some of her wealth, and did not disclose this on Iceland's parliamentary register of MPs' financial interests. When questioned about the company on camera by journalists from Swedish television company SVT he walked out of the interview.

The documents reveal a network of secret offshore deals and loans used by a a circle of close associates of President Vladimir Putin to launder billions of dollars.

Offshore companies linked to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Syrian President Bashar al Assad, and family members of Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister David Cameron were also revealed by the files. Poroshenko has in the past "positioned himself as a reformer in a country shaken by corruption scandals," noted the ICIJ, while Cameron has repeatedly made public statements denouncing tax havens and claiming his government will take action against those who use them.

Saudi Arabia's King Salman is also implicated, apparently having used money from a company in the British Virgin Islands to pay for mortgages on luxury properties in London and for a yacht he keeps parked in Marbella, Spain. The vessel has its own banquet hall and enough space to comfortably sleep 30 guests.

The leaked data also points to a link between a member of global soccer body FIFA's ethics committee and a Uruguayan soccer official who was arrested last year as part of a wide-ranging US probe into corruption in the sport.

FIFA's ethics committee said in a statement on Sunday that Juan Pedro Damiani, a member of the committee's judgment chamber, was being investigated over a possible business relationship with fellow Uruguayan Eugenio Figueredo, one of the soccer officials arrested in Zurich last year.

Damiani told Reuters in Montevideo on Sunday that he broke off relations with Figueredo when the latter was accused of corruption.

The leaked "Panama Papers" cover a period over almost 40 years, from 1977 until as recently as last December, and allegedly show that some companies domiciled in tax havens were being used for suspected money laundering, arms and drug deals, and tax evasion.

The head of Mossack Fonseca has denied any wrongdoing but acknowledged his firm had suffered a successful but "limited" hack on its database.

The firm's director, Ramon Fonseca described the hack and leak as "an international campaign against privacy."

Fonseca, who was up until March a senior government official in Panama, told Reuters on Sunday that the firm, which specializes in setting up offshore companies, has formed more than 240,000 such companies and noted the "vast majority" of these have been used for "legitimate purposes."

In a statement published by the Guardian, the firm said many of the people cited in press reports were not and never had been clients of Mossack Fonseca.

"For 40 years Mossack Fonseca has operated beyond reproach in our home country and in other jurisdictions where we have operations," it said.

In their reporting of the story, Chinese news outlets have avoided mentioning the names of senior Chinese officials who are named in the papers, according to BBC Monitoring. A Russian opposition newspaper has a seven-page spread about the allegations about Putin's friends, while two Ukrainian outlets are reporting the allegations about Poroshenko.

Follow VICE News on Twitter: vicenews
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Old 04-04-2016, 05:15 PM
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this can turn out pretty interesting.
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Old 04-05-2016, 08:52 AM
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Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca serviced Assad cousin's firms despite Syria corruption fears

In further twist, leaked documents show Rami Makhlouf was able to keep accounts open for months thanks to HSBC lobbying

Assad’s London fixer uses offshore firms to hold luxury flats
Sanctions: Mossack Fonseca’s links to blacklisted individuals
Mossack Fonseca’s full response to the allegations

Rami Makhlouf, the cousin of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. Photograph: AP

Juliette Garside and David Pegg

Tuesday 5 April 2016 10.38 BST


The firm at the centre of the Panama Papers leak serviced a string of companies for a top financier in Bashar al-Assad’s government in the face of international concern about corruption within the Syrian regime.

Documents show Mossack Fonseca’s links to Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of the Syrian president, who was described in US diplomatic cables as the country’s “poster boy for corruption”.

Washington imposed sanctions on Makhlouf in February 2008, saying he was a regime insider who “improperly benefits from and aids the public corruption of Syrian regime officials”. It blacklisted his brother Hafez Makhlouf in 2007.

The documents show, however, that the Panamanian firm continued to work with the Makhloufs, and in January 2011 it rejected the advice of its own compliance team to cut ties with the family as the crisis in Syria began to unfold.
Assad’s London fixer uses offshore firms to hold luxury London flats
Panama Papers reveal businessman linked to Syrian president invested in UK property after his name was taken off EU blacklist
Read more

Documents show a Mossack Fonseca compliance officer wrote: “I believe if an individual is found on a sanction list then this is a serious red flag and we should make every effort to disassociate ourselves from them.”

Though Mossack Fonseca was not legally bound to comply with US sanctions, it had an obligation to react to EU measures imposed in May 2011 and extended to the British Virgin Islands (BVI) in June of that year. It took until September 2011 before the partners finally agreed to resign from Makhlouf’s companies.

In a further twist, the documents reveal that thanks to lobbying by the British bank HSBC, Makhlouf was able to keep his Swiss bank accounts open throughout the opening rounds of a civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions forced to flee their homes over the past five years.

The Panama Papers, a hoard of 11.5m documents leaked from the offshore law firm, show Mossack Fonseca’s links to the Makhloufs for the first time, and how active the bank was in keeping the family plugged into the European financial system until the moment Swiss regulators froze their accounts on 19 May 2011.

Mossack Fonseca is the world’s fourth-largest offshore company provider.

Its data was leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with the Guardian and other media partners around the world.

The paper trail outlines how Mossack Fonseca, HSBC and British officials assisted Makhlouf, whose family was said to be worth $5bn (£3.5bn) before the war, with control of up to 60% of the Syrian economy.
Asma and Bashar al-Assad
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Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma in Paris in 2010. Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

The Makhlouf family empire included duty free, retail, banking and Syria’s largest mobile phone network, Syriatel. Its companies were registered in the BVI, and so not subject to US sanctions.
Syria's civil war: five years of Guardian reporting
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The BVI are only obliged to uphold European sanctions extended by the UK to its offshore territories. Mossack Fonseca, however, says it has a policy of not dealing with companies and individuals on US blacklists.

HSBC seems to have argued against cutting ties with the Makhloufs. A February 2011 email from Mossack Fonseca’s Geneva officestates: “Mr [X] told me that HSBC compliance department of the bank not only in Geneva but also in their head quarters in London know about Mr. makhlouf [sic] and that they are comfortable with him.”

The Swiss banker also said the US was planning a rapprochement with Assad. “Mr. [X] from HSBC told me also that USA and Syria are revising probable future cooperation.”

Also in February 2011, the Mossack Fonseca partner Chris Zollinger, who has since quit the firm, apparently decided to side with the bank. He emailed: “From my part – if HSBC Head Quarters in England – do not have an issue with the client, then I think we can also accept him.” It was another six months before the firm reversed this decision.

Through a spokesman, Zollinger said his commentary had been based on the assessment of the London and Geneva compliance departments of a well-known international bank. “In retrospective Zollinger says that his commentary was wrong and he regrets it. Six months later Mossack Fonseca resigned as registered agent from these companies.”

continu at http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016...P=share_btn_tw
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Old 04-05-2016, 01:08 PM
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Old 04-06-2016, 06:24 AM
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"They shall not change our way of life"
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Old 04-06-2016, 12:23 PM
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The Law Firm That Works with Oligarchs, Money Launderers, and Dictators

By Ken Silverstein December 3, 2014


One purpose of a so-called shell company is that the money put in it can't be traced to its owner. Say, for example, you're a dictator who wants to finance terrorism, take a bribe, or pilfer your nation's treasury. A shell company is a bogus entity that allows you to hold and move cash under a corporate name without international law enforcement or tax authorities knowing it's yours. Once the money is disguised as the assets of this enterprise—which would typically be set up by a trusted lawyer or crony in an offshore secrecy haven to further obscure ownership—you can spend it or use it for new nefarious purposes. This is the very definition of money laundering—taking dirty money and making it clean—and shell companies make it possible. They're "getaway vehicles," says former US Customs investigator Keith Prager, "for bank robbers."

Sometimes, however, international investigators are able to follow the money. Take the case of Rami Makhlouf, the richest and most powerful businessman in Syria. Makhlouf is widely believed to be the "bagman"—a person who collects and manages ill-gotten loot—for President Bashar al Assad, who during the past three years has helped cause the deaths of more than 200,000 of his citizens in the country's civil war.

Besides Assad, there are few people more hated in Syria than Makhlouf. He's the president's cousin and the brother of the chief of Syrian intelligence. Using these connections, Makhlouf built a business network that spanned from telecommunications to energy to banking, and by the time he reached 40 he had accumulated a fortune estimated to be in the billions. When the uprising against the regime began in early 2011, protesters torched a branch of his mobile-phone company and chanted, "Makhlouf is a thief!"

In 2006 the British magazine the New Statesmen said "no foreign company can do business in Syria without Makhlouf's approval and involvement," and a classified 2008 cable from the American embassy in Damascus released by WikiLeaks described him as the "poster boy of corruption in Syria." In that same year, the US Treasury Department banned US companies from doing business with Makhlouf, saying that he'd "amassed his commercial empire by exploiting his relationships with Syrian regime members" and "used Syrian intelligence officials to intimidate his business rivals."

When the Syrian civil war kicked off in 2011 and state security forces began gunning down Assad's opponents, the US and the European Union put Makhlouf on a list of regime cronies whose international assets should be traced and seized, because, as the Treasury Department put it, he'd grown rich by bribing and "aiding the public corruption of Syrian regime officials."

If Makhlouf was a bank robber, his getaway car was a company called Drex Technologies SA. In July 2012, the Treasury Department identified Drex—a dummy entity with a British Virgin Islands address—as the corporate vehicle Makhlouf secretly controlled and used "to facilitate and manage his international financial holdings." In other words, say Makhlouf had skimmed a few million dollars off the top of a secret business deal with a crooked Syrian official. He wouldn't put it into a bank account that he could be linked to; instead, he'd funnel it through Drex so the money couldn't be connected to him.

In late October, I obtained several documents about Drex from the British Virgin Islands business-registration office. The records reveal very little—Makhlouf's name, for example, is nowhere on them. It was only because the Syrian civil war had prompted international investigations to try to track down and freeze the assets of Makhlouf and other Assad regime bandits that the US Treasury discovered that he controlled the company and was its owner, officer, and shareholder. But by the time the Treasury Department did it was too late, as Drex had by then disappeared from the British Virgin Islands' corporate registry. In other words, Drex Technologies SA was a vehicle that hid Makhlouf's shadowy financial activities, and before that was discovered Makhlouf had had plenty of time to move its operations and assets to another offshore jurisdiction.

Across the globe, there are vast numbers of competing firms, and many of them register shells that are every bit as shady as Drex.

Yet who makes these fictitious entities possible? To conduct business, shell companies like Drex need a registered agent, sometimes an attorney, who files the required incorporation papers and whose office usually serves as the shell's address. This process creates a layer between the shell and its owner, especially if the dummy company is filed in a secrecy haven where ownership information is guarded behind an impenetrable wall of laws and regulations. In Makhlouf's case—and, I discovered, in the case of various other crooked businessmen and international gangsters—the organization that helped incorporate his shell company and shield it from international scrutiny was a law firm called Mossack Fonseca, which had served as Drex's registered agent from July 4, 2000, to late 2011.

Founded in Panama in 1977 by German-born Jurgen Mossack and a Panamanian man named Ramón Fonseca, a vice president of the country's current ruling party, it later added a third director, Swiss lawyer Christoph Zollinger. Since the 70s the law firm has expanded operations and now works with affiliated offices in 44 countries, including the Bahamas, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Brazil, Jersey, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands, and—perhaps most troubling—the US, specifically the states of Wyoming, Florida, and Nevada.

Mossack Fonseca, of course, is not alone in setting up shell companies used by the world's crooks and tax evaders. Across the globe, there are vast numbers of competing firms, and many of them register shells that are every bit as shady as Drex. Proof of this includes the case of Viktor Bout, who, in the 1990s, peddled arms to the Taliban through a Delaware-registered shell. More recently, in 2010, a man named Khalid Ouazzani pleaded guilty to using a Kansas City, Missouri, firm called Truman Used Auto Parts to move money for Al Qaeda.

Scattered news accounts and international investigations have pointed to Mossack Fonseca as one of the widest-reaching creators of shell companies in the world, but it has, until now, used an array of legal and accounting tricks that have allowed it and its clients to mostly fly under the radar.

(The company disputes this claim and asserted in an email that "there is no court or government record that has ever identified Mossack Fonseca as the creator of 'shell' companies. Anything tying our group to 'criminal activity' is unfounded, inasmuch as we have not actually been notified of the existence of any legal proceeding... thus far.")

But a yearlong investigation reveals that Mossack Fonseca—which the Economist has described as a remarkably "tight-lipped" industry leader in offshore finance—has served as the registered agent for front companies tied to an array of notorious gangsters and thieves that, in addition to Makhlouf, includes associates of Muammar Gaddafi and Robert Mugabe, as well as an Israeli billionaire who has plundered one of Africa's poorest countries, and a business oligarch named Lázaro Báez, who, according to US court records and reports by a federal prosecutor in Argentina, allegedly laundered tens of millions of dollars through a network of shell firms, some which Mossack Fonseca had helped register in Las Vegas.

Documents and interviews I've conducted also show that Mossack Fonseca is happy to help clients set up so-called shelf companies—which are the vintage wines of the money-laundering business, hated by law enforcement and beloved by crooks because they are "aged" for years before being sold, so that they appear to be established corporations with solid track records—including in Las Vegas. One international asset manager who talked to Mossack Fonseca about doing business with them told me that the firm offered to sell a 50-year-old shelf company for $100,000.

If shell companies are getaway cars for bank robbers, then Mossack Fonseca may be the world's shadiest car dealership.

Continued below. http://www.vice.com/read/evil-llc-0000524-v21n12
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Old 04-08-2016, 05:31 PM
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Something is extremely fishy about this. My case in point: Nobody from the USA implicated. I smell bullshit.
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Old 04-12-2016, 06:02 AM
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https://t.co/gqMQCHTK7g a global overview on this link:


also a common error: the money goes to several tax havens, but not Panama. It is only the country of the law firm.
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