HOW BANKSTERS and LAWYERS HIDE YOUR MONEY

PRIVACY = POWER AND ONLY BANKSTERS CAN PAY POLITICIANS TO KEEP THEIR SECRETS

INTERNATIONAL BANKSTERS 
 OFFER TAX EVASION, INVERSIONS, AND HAVENS

Tax Havens & Off Shore Banking

SEARCH THROUGH THE PANAMA PAPERS PUBLIC DATABASE

KNOW YOUR MUFUGAZZ!

Offshore corporations have one main purpose - to create anonymity. Shell companies, cloaked in secrecy, provide cover for dictators, politicians and tax evaders. 

The Opium Trade "If the trade is ever legalized, it will cease to be profitable from that time.
The more difficulties that attend it, the better for you and us." -- Directors of Jardine-Matheson

A rigged economy is when the top 1/10 of 1% owns as much as the bottom 90%. - Bernie Sanders

2017 Paradise Papers: Your guide to four years of offshore revelations
 https://archive.is/CmgQ7

Paradise Papers: Tax haven secrets of ultra-rich exposed A huge new leak of financial documents has revealed how the powerful and ultra-wealthy, including the Queen's private estate, secretly invest vast amounts of cash in offshore tax havens.

Two offshore firms, 19 secrecy jurisdictions, 13.4 million files. The Paradise Papers expose the secrets of the global elite.

BETWEEN $21 AND $32 TRILLION IS HIDING IN TAX HAVENS

2016 By one estimate -- based on data from the World Bank, IMF, UN, and central banks of 139 countries -- between $21 and $32 trillion is hiding in tax havens, more than the United States’ national debt. 

Fortune 500 cos are holding $2.5tn offshore avoiding $718bn in taxes according to @FACTCoalition members latest report

How did these secretive financial activities come to be called “offshore” in the first place?

When “offshore” first came ashore in English, it was used quite literally, as an adjective or adverb referring to something, like an island, located away from the mainland. An “offshore wind” is one that moves out to sea. In his 1720 pirate tale “Captain Singleton,” Daniel Defoe mentioned winds blowing “off shore” (or “off the shore”) three different times. After World War II, “offshore” started entering financial contexts as well. the Marshall Plan also allowed for “offshore purchases” of goods from Canada and other countries, sold with American dollars. A 1962 Wall Street Journal article on the Bahamas, already famous as a tax haven, pointed to the word’s new direction. The lenient tax laws of the island country facilitated the creation of many “U.S. offshore companies,” the Journal reported. As other English-speaking Caribbean islands joined in the development of “offshore” business activities, the term became enshrined more officially, with “offshore financial center” emerging as something of a euphemism for “tax haven” starting in the 1970s.

tools

 

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has ID SEARCH
“People using the new data platform, called ID Search, will be able to set up email alerts notifying them when new results appear for their searches or for persons tracked on official watchlists. They can also create their own private watchlists. Using the new tool, journalists and researchers will be able to access data including gazettes of commerce, company records, leaks, court cases and more. One of the most comprehensive open source lists of Politically Exposed Persons is also at users’ disposal. Starting today, most sources on ID Search will be updated every 24 hours.” Resources from all over the world are here, but seem more focused on Europe/Eurasia.

 

USA - CIA -  Cushing

 

THE USA LAUNDERS MONEY TO FINANCE THEIR MILITARY BUDGET WITH THE MONEY FROM THE WORLD'S CRIMINAL CLASS

READ HOW THIS ACTUALLY WORKS

Panama, and hence Panamanian companies, were set up initially to register oil tankers and mineral ships in order to give the appearance of taking all of their profits on the transporting the oil, or the copper or other minerals, from third world countries to the United States and Europe.

The United States went along with this. This made the oil industry tax exempt really since the 1920s. When the income tax was created in 1913 or 14, it was intended to capture economic rents. But the big rent extractors, oil and gas and minerals, got away with avoidance.

PANAMA PAPERS 

WEALTH OBJECTIVES

IS THE PROOF OF STRATEGY

 

How a U.S. president and JP Morgan made Panama: and turned it into a tax haven

History has its way of coming ironically around, and it certainly has in the early 21st century on two counts, echoing Panama’s genesis.  One is that the man who became president of Standard Oil back in those early days of tax dodging – William Stamps Farish II – had a grandson, William Farish III, who became a crucial aide and lieutenant to the Bush dynasty; he was “almost like family”, said Barbara Bush, and became her son George W Bush’s ambassador to London. (JP Morgan has meanwhile hired a string of illustrious ambassadors and consultants of late, few more prestigious than Bush’s closest ally, Tony Blair.)

In 1903 the US bullied Colombia into giving up the province that became Panama. The plan was to create a nation to serve the interests of Wall Street. The reason, of course, was to gain access to, and control of, the canal across the Panamanian isthmus that would open in 1914 to connect the world’s two great oceans, and the commerce that sailed them. The Panamanian state was originally created to function on behalf of the rich and self-seeking of this world – or rather their antecedents in America – when the 20th century was barely born.  The Roosevelt/JP Morgan connection in the setting-up of the new state was a direct one. The Americans’ paperwork was done by a Republican party lawyer close to the administration, William Cromwell, who acted as legal counsel for JP Morgan.  JP Morgan led the American banks in gradually turning Panama into a financial centre – and a haven for tax evasion and money laundering – as well as a passage for shipping, with which these practices were at first entwined when Panama began to register foreign ships to carry fuel for the Standard Oil company in order for the corporation to avoid US tax liabilities. Panama was created by the United States for purely selfish commercial reasons, right on that historical hinge between the imminent demise of Britain as the great global empire, and the rise of the new American imperium. In 1989 the US returned militarily, as it had eight decades previously, and – as Silverstein puts it – “returned to power the old banking elites, heirs of the JP Morgan legacy”.

U.S. corporations shifted more than a HALF-TRILLION DOLLARS to 10 tax havens in a single year 

Corporations set up affiliated shell companies in countries where taxes are low or nonexistent and reroute payments and liabilities to serve their needs. Mossack Fonseca is one of the widest-reaching creators of shell companies in the world. It  has served as the registered agent for front companies tied to an array of notorious gangsters and thieves. Shell companies 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. It has 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.

TAX AVOIDANCE

HOW AMAZON SAVED BILLIONS IN TAXES A cache of hidden court documents reveals Amazon's covert tax strategies in Luxembourg. A landmark court case between the Inland Revenue Service and Amazon could result in a $1.5 billion fine for Amazon, the company’s secret business success is out. A similar investigation into Ireland’s treatment of Apple this week resulted in the commission ordering Apple to pay 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in back taxes.

WAR IS AN ECONOMY

Q: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

A: HIDING MONEY!

The whole financial system basically has been criminalized in the process of being militarized, to subsidize the fact that countries like the United States and Britain have heavy military budgets.

This is how they finance their military budget – with money laundering by the world’s criminal class.

The byproduct is to leave the largest companies tax exempt, from Apple to Exxon, right down the line.

The problem that America had in the 1960s was the Vietnam War. The entire balance-of-payments deficit of the United States in the 1950s and the ‘60s, right down to the early ‘70s, was military spending abroad. Either the dollar was going down or the United States had to sell gold. That’s what finally led Nixon to take the dollar off gold in 1971. But for many years the United tried to fight against doing that.

So the State Department came to Chase, and said, we’ve got to figure out some way of getting enough dollars to offset the military deficit. They found the way to do it. It was to make the United States the new Switzerland of the world. I was asked to make a calculation of how much criminal capital there is in the world. How much the drug dealers made, how much the criminals all over made, how much the dictators secreted away. How much goes to Switzerland, and how can U.S. banks get this criminal money in the United States?

The end result was that the U.S. Government went to Chase and other banks and asked them to be good American citizens and make America safe for the criminals of the world, to safeguard their money to support the dollar in the process. 

The idea is not to put money into the United States directly. So what you have to do is launder the money. 

Likewise with the Colombian drug cartel. They’re not going to put the Colombian drug cartel balance in a Delaware bank under their name. It has to go through a lot of stages. The money goes out of the Ukraine and out of Russia into Latvia, primarily via the banks of Riga. I’ve met with individuals in Riga, Americans who provide the service of setting up maybe 30 companies for the money launderer. They will send the money, say, to the British West Indies. From the British West Indies it’ll go to Panama. And then it’ll go from Panama, already being concealed, to end up in a Delaware corporation at the end of the line. You can look and see how much American stock, how many American bonds, how many American bank deposits all come from these islands. The magnitude is so enormous that this is what has been supporting the dollar.

CONgress totally agrees with and supports this. 

In the 1960s it recognized that basically, criminals are the most liquid people in the world. They don’t want to tie down their money and property, because property can be seen, it’s visible. Finance in the balance of payments reports is called “Invisibles.” If you’re a criminal, you want to have your finance invisible in order to keep it safe. And the safest investment is U.S. Treasury bonds.

 

MOST FOREIGNERS WHO HOLD TREASURY BONDS ACTUALLY ARE CRIMINALS

So there was an argument in Congress in the 1960s:
Do we want to have 15% tax withholding on the Treasury bonds, especially to foreigners?

It was pointed out that most foreigners who hold Treasury bonds actually are criminals. So Congress said, we need criminal money. We are not going to withhold criminal taxes. We’re going to make crime tax-free. We’re going to tax American industry, we’re going to tax American labor, but not foreign criminals, because we need their money. So we’re not going to withhold what they hold through their fiduciary accounts in Delaware, which was the main at that time, or New York, or London branches of U.S. banks. The London branches of U.S. banks were the single major depositors and source of revenue of growth in the 1960s for Chase, Citibank and others. They were called eurodollars. The eurodollars flowing into these branches were very largely from drug dealing and arms dealing, and third world dictators in Africa and other places.

UNDER U.S. PRESSURE, THE INTERNATIONAL BANKING SYSTEM WAS SET UP TO FACILITATE THE MONEY LAUNDERING OF DRUG CAPITALSo under U.S. pressure, the international banking system was set up to facilitate the money laundering of drug capital. The reason the Americans and the Canadians were not particularly noteworthy in the law firm’s records is the Panamanian law firm’s records was that its role was to set up money laundering for foreigners, to conceal their means of getting money. But the oil industry doesn’t conceal it. The oil industry declares all of the income it gets, and the mining industry declares all the income that it gets from the Panamanian shipping companies, from the Liberian shipping companies. But because Panama and Liberia don’t have an income tax, there’s no tax liability for this. It’s stolen fair and square from the tax collector, just like California Senator Hayakawa said America had stolen Panama fair and square from Colombia.

The solution to Money Laundering is to tax companies on their worldwide earnings. 

WHY THE US IS THE BEST PLACE TO HIDE YOUR MONEY

 

12/2015 US has refused to join the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) 
CRS means that many countries which previously benefited from the opacity of the banking system would lose their attractiveness for foreign capitals.  There is no doubt that the Republicans and Democrats in Congress will delay joining CSR as much as possible since the current situation is lucrative for Washington.

(REPUBLICAN MAJORITY) The US has refused to join the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) which binds banks to share information about assets with tax services of other countries. Switzerland has accused the US of double standards and abuse of confidence.  On May 6, 2014, 47 countries agreed on a common reporting standard, an agreement to share information on residents’ assets and incomes automatically in conformation with the standard.  The initiative has been declared an effective way to counter tax evading by residents via transferring assets abroad.  On July 12,2015, 53 jurisdictions signed an agreement to automatically exchange information based on Article 6 of the Convention on Mutual Administrative Assistance in Tax Matters.  
CRS will come into effect in 2017 and information sharing between the parties will begin 2018.
The US is currently opposing joining the mechanism but may sign the document in the future, Anne Cesard, a representative of the Swiss State Secretariat for International Financial Matters, told El Confidencial.  "The refusal means that the US is free to act as it like, but our hands are tied," she added.  The world  already has – Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), allowing for sharing fiscal data, but not automatically.  However, there is a clear distinction between FATCA and CSR — FATCA is aimed at collecting fiscal data about US people for the US tax authorities. Thus while the other parties to FATCA must provide fiscal data to the US, the US itself can reject any request. As a result, foreigners holding their assets in the US are much more protected than in Switzerland.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET 

BANKSTER WOLVES OF WALLSTREET

Massive leak exposes how the wealthy and powerful hide their money

2009 The Hidden Wealth of the Richest 1%

2016 The secret story behind how “Wolf of Wall Street” was financed: 

Red Granite company that produced WOLF OF WALL STREET was actually “an int’l conspiracy to launder money” 

Red Granite came up with the more than $100 million needed to film the sex- and drug-fueled story of a penny-stock swindler.  Global investigators now believe much of the money to make the movie about a stock scam was diverted from a state fund 9,000 miles away in Malaysia, a fund that had been established to spur local economic development. The fund, 1Malaysia Development Bhd., or 1MDB, was set up seven years ago by the prime minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak. His stepson, Riza Aziz, isthe chairman of Red Granite Pictures.  The 1MDB fund is now the focus of numerous investigations at home and abroad, which grew out of $11 billion of debt it ran up and questions raised in Malaysia about how some of its money was used. Investigators in two countries believe that $155 million originating with 1MDB moved into Red Granite in 2012 through a circuitous route involving offshore shell companies, said people familiar with the probes. The film grossed about $400 million and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture. There is no indication any profits from it flowed to 1MDB or Malaysia. Investigators believe this money never got to Aabar in Abu Dhabi but went instead to a separate, almost identically named company that Mr. Al-Husseiny had helped set up in the British Virgin Islands, called Aabar Investments PJS Ltd., said people familiar with the probes.

2017 The U.S. government's fight against "The Wolf of Wall Street" could be reaching its finale.
Last summer, the Justice Department laid claim to profits from the 2013 Leonardo DiCaprio blockbuster because the production company, Red Granite Pictures, was implicated in a massive foreign fraud case. Now the two parties are discussing a settlement, according to court documents filed Tuesday. U.S. prosecutors allege that corrupt officials and financiers stole $3.5 billion from a Malaysian government investment fund called 1Malaysia Development Berhad. Tens of millions of dollars was diverted to Red Granite Pictures to produce "The Wolf of Wall Street," the agency said. The Justice Department wants to seize $1 billion that traveled through American banks. It also wants any rights, royalties and distributions fees from the movie.

 

2014 Meet The Real 'Wolf Of Wall Street' In Forbes' Original Takedown Of Jordan Belfort 
and then we learn that the very magazine FORBES that chronicles the new titans it itself on the way out too. Steve and Timothy Forbes, the sons of Malcolm Forbes need to sell.  All good things come to an end, even for the rich, and Forbes will probably pass out of family control for small money to a foreign buyer!

Barney Warf: Contact Center for Global & International Studies cgis@ku.edu 785-864-1120

2016 u.s .
Money Laundering
Loophole Rules

 

Under the final Customer Due Diligence rule, the beneficial owner could be listed as the agent who manages the shell corporation, rather than the ones who own it. Under this definition, the “beneficial owner” could be a designated manager, like a lawyer at Mossack Fonseca, the company at the heart of the Panama Papers leaks who set up hundreds of thousands of shell companies for their clients. This would be of no use whatsoever to law enforcement in cracking down on the true beneficiary, the individuals profiting from the shell corporation setup. This  corrupts the definition of beneficial ownership as it has been commonly used. In addition, the final rule places a threshold in their definition of legal ownership of 25 percent equity interest in the corporation. Experts believe this provides would-be money launderers with a blueprint for how to avoid detection by diffusing their ownership stakes through multiple beneficiaries. In addition, accounts set up in escrow by lawyers are excluded from the provisions.

 

PANAMA PAPERS SEARCH THROUGH THE PUBLIC DATABASE

LONDON

DARK MONEY: LONDON'S DIRTY SECRET

300000 offshore shell companies The database contains ownership information about companies created in 10 offshore jurisdictions including the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and Singapore. It covers nearly 30 years until 2010.

In an age of austerity, protesters had railed aqainst financial structures that they believed kept the rich wealthy at the expense of other taxpayers. Now here was what might have felt to them like a counterpunch against “the 1 per cent”. It was crucial to avoid a paper trail that might allow the authorities to spot a connection between a US taxpayer and a secret account. For an extra quarterly fee, the bank would refer to clients only by a code name on all documents relating to their Swiss accounts. More than a third of the bank’s American clients — there were 3,500 in total, with $2.8bn in declared and undeclared accounts — used this service. Two-thirds gave “hold mail” instructions, meaning that nothing should be sent by post to the client’s home address. If necessary, BSI bankers would fly from Switzerland to the US to hand-deliver account documents. 

The City is intimately connected to British Crown dependencies and overseas territories such as Guernsey and the Virgin Islands that supply front companies, anonymous trusts and other types of financial camouflage. “If you lump them all together,” says Alex Cobham, head of research at the Tax Justice Network campaign group, “the British secrecy network is the biggest in the world.”

Importing #PanamaPapers into @Neo4j, either with the bulk importer in 23s or with @docker and LOAD CSV. Enjoy! https://archive.is/FCnp5 and the people and the technology behind the panama papers

Search through the data and visualize the networks around thousands of offshore entities, including, when available, Mossack Fonseca’s internal records of the company’s true owners. The interactive database will also include information about more than 100,000 additional companies that were part of the 2013 ICIJ Offshore Leaks investigation. It will be a careful release of basic corporate information.  ICIJ won’t release personal data en masse; the database will not include records of bank accounts and financial transactions, emails and other correspondence, passports and telephone numbers. The selected and limited information is being published in the public interest.

It exposed the role of big banks in facilitating secrecy and tax evasion and avoidance. And it showed how companies and individuals blacklisted in the U.S. and elsewhere for their links to terrorism, drug trafficking and other crimes were able to do business through offshore jurisdictions.

Panama is not even in the top 10 countries with the least financial transparency.
They say that rich Europeans and North Americans can easily hide their money much closer to home IN THE USA 
And this may explain why so few US residents have so far been implicated in the Panama scandal.

The profits US corporations stashed in 10 tax havens in 2012 is 1/2 trillion dollars almost the amount of the entire US military budget.

Democracy and Political Influence at root, the Panama Papers are not about tax. They’re not even about money.

What the Panama Papers really depict is the corruption of our democracy. Following on from LuxLeaks, the Panama Papers confirm that the super-rich have effectively exited the economic system Tax havens are simply one reflection of that reality. Discussion of offshore centres can get bogged down in technicalities, but the best definition I’ve found comes from expert Nicholas Shaxson who sums them up as: “You take your money elsewhere, to another country, in order to escape the rules and laws of the society in which you operate.” In so doing, you rob your own society of cash for hospitals, schools, roads… the rest of us have to live in. Thirty years of runaway incomes for those at the top, and the full armoury of expensive financial sophistication, mean they no longer play by the same rules the rest of us have to follow. 

HOW THEY HACKED IT 
Panama Papers: Email Hackable via WordPress, Docs Hackable via Drupal  April 8, 2016 
The Mossack Fonseca (MF) data breach, aka Panama Papers, is the largest data breach to journalists in history and includes over 4.8 million emails. Yesterday we broke the story that MF was running WordPress with a vulnerable version of Revolution Slider and the WordPress server was on the same network as their email servers when the breach occurred.

 

Who is really behind the creation of these mechanisms and loopholes for tax evasion?
 

Panama wasn’t designed to launder money. It was designed to launder earnings – mainly by the oil and the gas industries, and the mining industry.  Panama and Liberia were long noted as having “flags of convenience.”

 

Panama Papers source breaks silence over 'scale of injustices

The whistleblower behind the Panama Papers broke their silence on Friday to explain in detail how the injustices of offshore tax havens drove them to the biggest data leak in history. The source, whose identity and gender remain a secret, denied being a spy. “For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. My viewpoint is entirely my own.” the legal profession, which helped set up tens of thousands of Mossack Fonseca-run shell companies. More than half the law firm’s offshore corporations were based in the British Virgin Islands, a UK-administered tax haven.  “Mossack Fonseca did not work in a vacuum. Despite repeated fines and documented regulatory violations, it found allies and clients at major law firms in virtually every nation,” the manifesto claimed.

Wealth uses Attorneys and accountants to hide their money in shell companies registered in Tax Havens.
Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, would be one member of an international panel formed to review Panama's legal and financial practices and recommend improvements.

Panama Papers: Corporations Shifted A Half-Trillion Dollars To Offshore Tax Havens In 2012 

Here's an absolutely amazing stat about U.S. corporations stashing cash in tax havens. Obama admin moves to try to block EU regulators from cracking down on corporate tax evasion.

5/28/16 Panama-based Mossack Fonseca law firm says it will close its offices in Jersey and Isle of Man -- two Crown dependencies of Britain -- and Gibraltar -- a British overseas territory jutting off from Spain. The announcement came nearly eight weeks after the first reports about the Panama Papers emerged, divulging details taken from nearly four decades of records from Mossack Fonseca's computer archives.  They revealed that many prominent leaders, politicians, celebrities and wealthy individuals around the world used Mossack Fonseca to start up or run offshore entities to hold their assets.

 

The Bankster Families Who Control Opium Smuggling

The names of the families and institutions are known to the history student: Matheson, Keswick, Swire, Dent, Baring, and Rothschild; Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Chartered Bank, the Peninsular and Orient Steam Navigation Company [P&O]. 
Panama Papers: Bermuda mentioned in UK media British parliamentarians have come under further fire over offshore assets after a Tory party official admitted having assets in Bermuda. In an article published online yesterday, The Sun reported that 12 senior Tory officials had put their assets in offshore blind trusts to avoid “clashes with their jobs”, including Robert Halfon, the Tory party deputy leader. Mr Halfon admitted holding shares in Jardine Matheson, a firm based in Bermuda with headquarters in Hong Kong. The article explains that blind trusts are used to prevent ministers from using their positions from influencing their own investments, but also keeps their financial affairs private. 

HSBC The Pirate Bank - The purpose of HSBC is to launder money. HSBC sold its Panama bank in 2013

 

The Law Firm That Works with Oligarchs, Money Launderers, and Dictators

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."
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.

 

BANKS SELL SECRECY AS
THEIR PRODUCT

 

#1 TO SET UP AN OFFSHORE ACCOUNT YOU'LL NEED AN APOSTILLE STAMP
http://www.apostille.us/documents/apostille.shtml
In 1961 The Hague Conference on Private International Law established the Apostille. Apostille is an authentication certification, a stamp. It is designed for use among nations that participate in the Hague Convention. These joint regions are called signatory countries as formed by the Hague Conference on Private International Law. Apostille only pertains to public documents. Primary examples of public instruments are marriage, birth and death certificates as well as court documents, patents and even diplomas.

PANAMA PAPERS

GEOGRAPHIES OF CORRUPTION

 

MOSSACK FONSECA LAW FIRM HIDES THE MONEY
HSBC’s top brass have “no idea” about Mossack Fonseca. Here’s a primer.

Names of prominent Americans not likely in Panama Papers because foreign banks need to be FATCA compliant (can't have US accounts)

THE WESTERN BANKING SYSTEM HAS ASSISTED THE WORLD’S KLEPTOCRATS AND TAX DODGERS

"WE KNOW (OF) … UPWARDS TO $6 TO $10 BILLION A YEAR LAUNDERED THROUGH THE U.S."  ~ Patrick Fallon Jr., head of the FBI’s financial crimes section

Dirty Little Secrets Mossack and his business partner Ramon Fonseca, are captains in an offshore industry that has had a major impact on the world’s finances since the 1970s. The Panama Paper leak is estimated to be 100 times bigger than Wikileaks. It's believed to be the largest global investigation in history. 

Phrases like secrecy jurisdiction, tax haven and offshore have overlapping meanings, roughly translating as an “escape” from laws in one place to a locale whose allure is zero-to-low tax rates – along with tools to hide one’s identity, according to the Tax Justice Network. The network, an advocacy group that argues that tax havens have exacerbated global poverty and income inequality by giving the corrupt and the rich a place to stash assets, ranks Panama as No. 13 on its Financial Secrecy Index.
In 1983, six armed robbers looted $40 million in gold bars from the Brinks-Mat warehouse near London’s Heathrow Airport. Less than 18 months later, Mossack formed a Panamanian shell company for a man named Gordon Parry. Parry was convicted in 1992 of laundering money from the London heist, the second-biggest robbery in Britain’s history. But Mossack continued to do business with the company, despite realizing as early as 1986 that the company was “apparently involved in the management of money from the famous theft from Brink’s-Mat in London,” according to an internal memo. “The company itself has not been used illegally, but it could be that the company invested money through bank accounts and properties that was illegitimately sourced.”

The Panama Papers: how the world’s rich and famous hide their money offshore

 

Mossack Fonseca a Panama-based law firm 
The Panama Papers show us that just because certain behavior is “legal” does not prove that it is ethical or just. 

A world of hidden wealth:
why we are shining a light offshore Huge leak reveals how the powerful exploit secretive tax regimes – and widen the gulf between rich and poor.

The political debate around tax avoidance so far has focused only on individuals – not businesses like Blairmore that operate outside the tax jurisdiction of the largest world economies. Due to the opaque nature of Panama's company records, it is impossible to know the full extent of his earnings from the fund, the size of his shareholding or what happened to the shares after his death.

live map 4/3/16

The global movement to recapture trillions of the hidden wealth of nations.

The Panama Papers reveal the widespread use of shell corporations in the British Virgin Islands, the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, and Panama. Historically, North American investors prefer tax havens in the Caribbean or Panama, with an estimated 54 percent of offshore investments going to those areas. Other popular tax dodging destinations were Switzerland, Ireland, and the Channel Islands, off the coast of England.  Transnational corporations also have an estimated $2 trillion in assets hidden in offshore tax havens or stashed in subsidiary corporations in countries with minimal or no corporate taxation.
The Panama Papers are nothing but the US attempt "to drain certain tax havens and position itself as the new largest tax haven. Most of the US banks, especially in federal states like Nevada, South Dakota, Wyoming and Delaware, enjoy unlimited secrecy, which is why they are often referred to as "new Switzerland". The Panama Papers, exposing the illegal financial activities of politicians and celebrities via offshore companies, is just an instrument in the hands of the US aimed at "redirecting financial flows" to the country.

Luxenburg is THE place for Multinationals to hide their money
Exposing Luxembourg's tax secrets
Disney, Apple, etc
VIDEO http://www.business-standard.com/video-gallery/featured-videos/hero-or-criminal-exposing-luxembourg-s-tax-secrets-17690.htm

The whistle-blower at the center of a tax scandal involving some of the world's biggest companies speaks to Bloomberg. Antoine Deltour faces up to five years behind bars for leaking documents from global accountancy giant PwC's Luxembourg offices. He told Tom Mackenzie he has no regrets about his role in what became known as the 'LuxLeaks' scandal. Beck, 49, is one of about 30 Swiss advisers who have been indicted in the U.S. since 2008, part of a broad probe of tax evasion and undeclared offshore accounts. At least 21 are still at large, including Beck. More than 50,000 Americans have avoided prosecution by disclosing undeclared accounts, paying over $7 billion. Separately, offshore banks have agreed to pay more than $4 billion in U.S. fines, penalties and restitution. Federal prosecutors haven’t sought the extradition of the indicted Swiss advisers because Switzerland generally won’t extradite its own citizens.

Sons of Indicted Swiss Financial Adviser Keep Business in the Family

For more than two decades, prosecutors allege, Swiss financial adviser Josef Beck practiced the dark art of handling dirty money. He conspired with Switzerland’s biggest bank, UBS Group AG, to help dozens of Americans evade taxes, once using a young child to deliver a bag of cash to a client, according to a 2012 federal indictment (PDF). He has never come to the U.S. to face those charges, and the Department of Justice considers him a fugitive. Yet in a low-rise Zurich office building, the Beck family business of advising wealthy Americans lives on.

3/18/15 EU plans tax transparency clampdown

The European Commission has laid out plans to clamp down on so-called sweetheart tax deals between governments and multinationals.  The Tax Transparency Package proposes that European governments automatically exchange details of tax rulings to try to tackle "aggressive tax planning". Each country would have to declare all its tax rulings every three months.  The move comes during ongoing investigations into a number of member states' tax regimes.  Luxembourg, Ireland and the Netherlands have all been put under the spotlight.  Belgium's tax deals are also under scrutiny. The Commission is investigating whether the tax regimes of the EU nations amount to state aid.  Allegations also emerged last year that around 340 multinational companies had tax avoidance deals with Luxembourg.  Among the companies accused of signing "sweetheart deals" with Luxembourg to avoid billions in taxes in other countries were Pepsi, Amazon, Ikea, Microsoft, Disney, Skype and Fiat.

2015 The Swiss Amnesty program is part of a tax evasion crackdown that grew after 2009 when Switzerland’s biggest bank, UBS Group AG, paid $780 million to avoid prosecution, and the U.S. began criminal investigations of 14 other banks, including Credit Suisse Group AG. 41 Swiss banks signed amnesty agreements this year with the U.S. Justice Department that required disclosing the tricks they used to help customers hide assets, naming bankers and middlemen who enabled them and detailing the flow of untaxed money. They’ve also prodded thousands of reluctant Americans to disclose accounts hidden from the Internal Revenue Service. Broadening the push, the U.S. in 2013 offered to forgo prosecuting any Swiss bank that came clean on tax-evasion tactics. So far this year, the 41 banks paid combined penalties of $354.5 million, with BSI SA paying the lion’s share, or $211 million (see interactive chart).

ACT LIKE SHEEP

[KR722] Keiser Report: Central Bank Command, Control World”
LABOR DOESN'T MATTER ANYMORE
http://www.maxkeiser.com/2015/02/kr722-keiser-report-central-bank-command-control-world

SEE HSBC

HSBC  too big to fail, too well connected to prosecute

Off Shore Tax Shelters Explained  

Secrecy creates an environment where fraud, tax evasion, money laundering and other forms of corruption thrive.

see 1/09 Wealth Management in Switzerland PDF
<> https://twitter.com/taxjustice <>  Tax Havens Cheat US Taxpayers  <> Citizens for Tax Justice

Rupert Murdock only taxed 6% is a media player using offshore tax havens. GE pays no tax in the U.S.

UK prepares 25% 'Google Tax' to stop tech giants' tax avoidance
http://www.techspot.com/news/59988-uk-prepares-25-google-tax-stop-tech-giants.html
More importantly, the Google Tax will be accompanied by far stricter corporate reporting rules, which would require major companies to disclose their revenue and profit from operations in each country they operate in. This would result in the UK government knowing exactly how much a major company such as Google makes in the country before they shuffle profits away to tax havens.

3/11/15 Anti-avoidance powers to hunt multinationals 'ineffective': ATO 
Actual tax collected from multinationals involved in profit-shifting
The main legal weapon used by the tax office to hunt down multinationals trying to avoid paying tax often doesn't work, a problem that could cost the federal government billions a year.  A Tax Office internal document, Offshore hubs mitigation strategy overview, said that Australia's general anti-avoidance rule, Part IVA, in some cases can't be used to combat tax avoidance.

 

2016 Cayman is the largest offshore banking centre in the world.
It is the second largest captive insurance base after Bermuda and a large trust sector.

 

10/7/15 Here's how much money Apple and Google are hiding overseas, in one chart: 

U.S. companies are holding $2.1 trillion — an amount of cash worth the entire gross domestic product of India — in foreign tax havens. Of the top 30 withholders overall, 10 of those were tech companies, making the creators and providers of our technological future the most represented group when it comes to draconian corporate tactics.

Apple, which walks in the footsteps of the Dutch East India Trading Company as the most valuable company on Earth, is the record holder: $181 billion in foreign tax shelters. By shuffling that money out of the reach of taxation, Apple avoids owing the federal government more than $59 billion. That's over three times Obama's proposed budget for NASA and over twice as much as it cost us to put a man on the moon.

Overall, the report estimates that corporations exploiting these tax loopholes account for $90 billion of lost federal revenue each year.

 

The @TaxJusticeNet's latest podcast looks at #HSBCLeaks "banking's like the asbestos problem"

Americans Use the Banks

 

10/2/15 Lord Michael Anthony Ashcroft. A longtime party donor, Ashcroft once drew criticism in the U.K. for exerting full-press political influence while enjoying part-time tax status. Now, he has emerged as the controlling shareholder of a pair of offshore banks with American clients who are under suspicion of tax evasion. The full details of Ashcroft’s tax status were known only to Ashcroft and the U.K.’s tax service, according to U.K. press reports, while Ashcroft said he would abandon his non-dom status.  
Non-Dom Rules Since then, there’s been an upwelling of U.K. protests and parliamentary hearings over whether wealthy individuals, as well as the likes of Google Inc., Starbucks Corp. and Vodafone Group Plc, have taken unfair steps to avoid taxes.
Ashcroft grew up in Belize, the son of a U.K. diplomat. He once served as the small Central American nation’s permanent representative to the United Nations.  He is the controlling shareholder of a Belize company called BCB Holdings Ltd., which in turn owns Belize Bank International Ltd. and Belize Bank Ltd., according to BCB’s latest annual report. Lord Ashcroft was BCB’s executive chairman for more than 20 years beginning in 1987, according to earlier annual reports, one of which listed him as the CEO in 2005.

2/19/09 BANKSTERS used encrypted laptop computers and counter-surveillance tactics during trips to the U.S. in which they helped American clients evade taxes.

 

john carroll jr. invented inversions

The first tax inversion
was called the ‘Panama Flip'

The unpatriotic
tax loopholeTHE FIRST INVERSION

The Greatest Tax Story Ever Told By Zachary R. Mider December 18, 2014

Kraus & John Carroll Jr., invented a whole category of corporate tax avoidance and successfully defended it in a fight with the Internal Revenue Service.

THIS IS CONGRESS' FAULT !

“The law is an unintelligible monstrosity, and it’s Congress’s fault,” ~ Kraus

“I wrap myself in the American flag,” he said. “And I say, without the slightest fear of successful contradiction—blah, blah, blah, blah!” ~ Carroll

 “I would really like to see the tax code completely scrapped. The whole business of trying to define income and deductions is pure madness. And I’ve got no one to thank except myself for creating that.” ~ Carroll

The first corporate “inversion,” as Carroll’s maneuver came to be known, has  at least 45 companies who have followed the lead of Carroll’s client, New Orleans-based construction company McDermott International (MDR), and shifted their legal addresses to low-tax foreign nations. Total corporate savings so far: at least $9.8 billion—money that otherwise would have gone to the U.S. government.

Profits had created a big tax problem. ~ McDermott
Most of the income had been earned abroad, and the parent company in New Orleans couldn’t touch it without first paying U.S. taxes on it—at a rate of as much as 46 percent. The earnings were piling up in Treasury bonds offshore.

Carroll hit upon an elegant but untested solution: Simply flip the company structure, so its main foreign subsidiary, incorporated in Panama, becomes the parent. Just like that, all those offshore profits would slip out from under the U.S. corporate tax system. Carroll nicknamed it the Panama Scoot. There was something screwy about the plan, like a daughter legally adopting her own mother, and the details were staggeringly complicated, involving share swaps, dividends, and debt guarantees. Panama’s piratical past For four centuries the Chagres River has been the bond of union between the two great oceans of the world, the way between the East and West. It was the original, natural Panama Canal.

The IRS fought the case for seven years, giving up in 1989 only after a federal appeals court upheld a U.S Tax Court decision in the company’s favor.
The 99% can thank KEITH and WELLFORD, Circuit Judges; and GILMORE*, District Judge. WELLFORD, Circuit Judge for allowing this to happen.

Stiffer regulations won’t stop the exodus. Ever since the McDermott deal, inversions have been the subject of legions of congressional hearings, bills, and regulations, yet companies continue to find ways to circumvent them and escape the U.S. tax system.

Congress passed a law banning federal contracts for inverted companies in 2007

[ Davis Polk Law Firm] 
The firm traces its origins to Gunthrie, Bangs & Van Sinderen, founded in 1849 by Francis S. Bangs, an opponent of Tammany Hall.[6] The firm changed its name several times to account for new partners, using names such as Bangs, Stetson, Tracy, and McVeigh and Stetson, Jennings & Russell. Among other high-profile lawyers, Grover Cleveland served as a member of the firm during the interval between his two non-consecutive presidential terms. Davis Polk was located at 15 Broad Street from around 1889 until 1959. The firm takes its current name from three 20th century partners: John W. Davis, Frank Polk, and Allen Wardwell. Davis, a former U.S. Solicitor General and the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee, made 139 oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court, most infamously in Brown v. Board of Education, in which he represented South Carolina in defense of racial segregation. With Polk and Wardwell, Davis developed close ties between the firm and the J.P. Morgan companies, as well as the Guaranty Trust Company, the Associated Press, and International Paper.
John W. Davis, Frank Polk, and Allen Wardwell. Davis, a former U.S. Solicitor General and the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee, made 139 oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court, most infamously in Brown v. Board of Education, in which he represented South Carolina in defense of racial segregation. With Polk and Wardwell, Davis developed close ties between the firm and the J.P. Morgan companies, as well as the Guaranty Trust Company, the Associated Press, and International Paper.

 

Tax Havens Cheat US Taxpayers
"Twenty-eight of these corporations reveal that they have paid an income tax rate of 10 percent or less to the governments of the countries where these profits are officially held, indicating that most of these profits are likely in offshore tax havens."

 

The Damage of Offshore Banking The US offers tax free treatment to foreigners who bring their money into the U.S.

Banks, Accounting Firms and Legal Firms also assist the criminal tax evasion.
Financial Regulation by England, Luxenberg, Ireland, the Netherlands engage in economic warfare agains the United States when they suck the tax revenue from the U.S.

 

Who Cares
About Going after
The Small Fries?

2008 Senate hearing identified as $100 billion in annual tax evasion by American owners of foreign accounts.

IRS unlocks UBS vault hiding Americans evading taxes.  Undeclared bank accounts at UBS, (UBS) the Swiss banking giant sued Thursday by U.S. authorities in an escalated demand for the identities of owners of approximately 52,000 such accounts in which Americans secretly held at least $14.8 billion. U.S. authorities filed the civil lawsuit in Miami, one day after reaching a deferred-prosecution deal in which UBS agreed to a $780 million settlement of criminal charges it helped American customers evade federal taxes. The agreement required the bank to turn over identities of some of those clients.

CORRUPT
Department of Justice

There is no justice
Corrupt U.S. Justice Department is dragging its feet on prosecuting Swiss banks that helped Americans evade taxes and on collecting billions of dollars likely owed to the U.S. Treasury by tax dodgers, a powerful U.S. Senate.

WHY DID Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican  blocked an amendment to a U.S. Swiss tax treaty that lawmakers and witnesses said would make it easier for Swiss banks to hand over data on thousands of Americans with accounts hidden from the IRS​?

Now wealthy American tax cheats still able to hide their money because Swiss banks are still eager to help them. 

Credit Suisse opened Swiss accounts for more than 22,000 U.S. customers with combined assets of as much as $12 billion.

PricewaterhouseCoopers Ernst & Young, Deloitte and KPMG - AND Lawyers work with banks to get the job done.

<< In wake of Twitter #SwissLeaks, see this from the Great Tax Robbery (2009/10 figures). pic.twitter.com/vGRiUZQrCN @rbrooks45 February 14, 2015 >>

 

12/30/14 Treasury gives banks more time on tax evasion
The Obama administration gave foreign banks more breathing room for complying with a new law that aims to crack down on offshore tax evasion. The Treasury Department said that it would allow 2014 and 2015 to be a transition period for banks that are making a “good faith” effort to comply with the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which goes into effect on July 1. FATCA, enacted by Congress in 2010, forces foreign banks to disclose certain account information to U.S. authorities, or face a withholding tax. The Treasury Department has signed dozens of agreements with other countries to enforce FATCA.  The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, which last month asked Treasury for a FATCA transition period, praised the administration’s decision. SIFMA had argued that banks would not have enough time to comply with a batch of Treasury regulations issued this year without that sort of breathing room.

This is the age of the whistleblower.

Whistleblowers are becoming to this decade what rock stars were to the Sixties — pop culture icons, global countercultural heroes.

Media leaks on HSBC accounts 'tip of iceberg': whistleblower Falciani 
​http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0LE1PA20150210
Media leaks on HSBC accounts held in Switzerland "are only the tip of the iceberg," Herve Falciani, the former HSBC employee who supplied information on the bank's clients and their tax situation, told French daily Le Parisien.

Tax Justice Network ‏@TaxJusticeNet 
“So you might ask, what’s the appropriate financial penalty for a bank in HSBC’s position?..."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/a-whistleblowers-horror-story-20150218

How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214

We’re going to quote from an article in 2012 by Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone magazine, which was examining the latest HSBC mega-scandal of the time. He was outraged, as we all should be, at the lightness of the sentencing in a case that had involved shifting money for the massacre-happy Mexican Sinaloa cartel, for groups linked to Al Qaeda; for Russian gangsters; and also the provision of help to countries like Iran, Sudan and North Korea to evade sanctions. HSBC got away with a fine equivalent to five weeks’ profits, and HSBC itself agreed to “partially defer” bonus compensation for its most senior officials. It was sickening then. If you want to be sickened now, then read this. http://www.taxjustice.net/2015/02/19/deal-hsbc/

 

2014

2/26/14 Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) holds a Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations hearing on offshore tax evasion. Witnesses include Deputy Attorney General James Cole.

Offshore Tax Evasion, Panel  Justice Department officials testified on efforts to collect unpaid taxes from offshore bank accounts.

American companies are finding new overseas tax havens to legally protect some of their profits from the U.S. tax rate of 35 percent, among the highest in the world.  Credit Suisse encouraged Americans to open up an account at the Zurich Airport with cash and they don't have to report this to the American government because THE U.S. SENATE did not sign a treaty that would allow the Suisse Government to "share" that information with the U.S. Switzerland counts on banking for 7 percent of its economic output: until Swiss banks know how much information they need to share with foreign tax authorities they will struggle to attract new clients.
Credit Suisse had provided all the information to U.S. authorities it was allowed to under Swiss law, the person said. It wanted to provide additional information, but the U.S. Senate had not ratified a bilateral treaty between the two countries that would allow this, the person added. 'TARGET LETTER' The bank has been in authorities' sights for years. It disclosed in 2011 it had received a "target letter" from prosecutors indicating that the bank was under criminal investigation. Also in 2011 a grand jury issued a subpoena seeking client names and account information, the report said, citing a briefing by Credit Suisse. Seven of its Swiss bankers were indicted in that year, but all remain overseas. Instead of enforcing the subpoena or threatening to indict the bank and entering an agreement to obtain client names, the panel said, the DOJ has largely deferred to Swiss authorities who have limited the documents being turned over. In the statement, the Justice Department said the agency was able to receive information through a U.S.-Swiss treaty process, but that information was not yet known to the public.

Here’s another rigged game. must read statement
The U.S.-Swiss extradition treaty is supposed to enable each country to obtain the transfer of a criminal defendant from the other country.  But that treaty has an exception giving the Swiss the discretion to deny an extradition request for a person accused of a tax offense.  DOJ has indicted 38 Swiss banking and other professionals for aiding and abetting U.S. tax evasion.  The indictment of the seven Credit Suisse bankers is already three years old.  But 34 of those 38 defendants have yet to stand trial.  Instead, most are openly residing in Switzerland.  One Swiss banker who left Switzerland to vacation in Italy was recently arrested and is here and set to stand trial in October, but he’s the exception.  It is bad enough that the Swiss can deny extradition for persons aiding and abetting U.S. tax evasion; it is inexplicable that the United States hasn’t even made extradition requests.  After DOJ overcame Swiss secrecy obstacles to obtain 4,700 accounts with U.S. client names from UBS, many predicted Swiss secrecy would no longer impede U.S. prosecutions.  In 2008 testimony before this Subcommittee, Justice officials pledged to act energetically.  Associate Attorney General Kevin O’Connor testified, despite the challenges posed by bank secrecy, “we will not be deterred. We will pursue other formal and informal methods of obtaining the foreign evidence we seek.  This includes the use of John Doe summonses as well as Grand Jury subpoenas.”  That did not happen as promised, but it’s not too late to fulfill that pledge.  DOJ can still use U.S. tools, including grand jury subpoenas, John Doe summons, and U.S. indictments, to get U.S. client names from the 14 targeted banks, which includes some of the largest.  It can still make extradition requests for indicted Swiss bankers and test Switzerland’s professed willingness to cooperate with U.S. tax enforcement.  DOJ can still hold accountable the U.S. tax evaders and the tax haven banks that helped them, if it’s got the will.  Among the questions we will be asking today is why DOJ has slowed its investigations of the 14 banks through its failure to use U.S. legal tools; why it accepted Swiss bank secrecy principles in the DOJ non-prosecution program; why it obtained only 238 accounts with U.S. client names in five years out of the tens of thousands of Credit Suisse accounts; and how it plans to collect the unpaid taxes still owed on billions of dollars of Credit Suisse accounts.

 

NO JUSTICE
NO PEACE

9/31/14 Several Swiss banks pull out of U.S. tax program
At least 10 Swiss banks have withdrawn from a U.S. program aimed at settling a tax dispute between them and the United States, Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag said on Sunday, quoting unnamed sources.  Around 100 Swiss banks came forward at the end of last year to work with U.S. authorities in a program brokered by the Swiss government to help the banks make amends for aiding tax evasion.  "At least 10 banks that had decided at the end of 2013 to pay a fine have withdrawn their decision," "New Journal of Zurich" is a Swiss, German-language daily newspaper, NZZ am Sonntag said, quoting unnamed lawyers and auditors. It did not name the banks concerned.  The newspaper said the banks were convinced they had not systematically broken U.S. law and lawyers of the U.S. Department of Justice had actually been surprised to see them take part in the program and did not object to the banks leaving the program. Liechtenstein-based VP Bank came forward last week to say it had concluded that it no longer needed to take part in the program.  About a dozen Swiss banks face a U.S. criminal investigation as part of the tax probe.

Credit Suisse has already settled by agreeing to plead guilty and pay a fine of $2.6 billion earlier this year 2014.
reuters.com/article/2014/08/31/us-swiss-banks-tax-idUSKBN0GV09X20140831

Whistle Blowers

 

 

12/14/14 French prosecutors have increased efforts to punish tax evasion since the country’s former budget minister, Jerome Cahuzac, was forced to resign after his secret Swiss account was exposed. The government has targeted wealthy individuals who stashed assets over the border in Switzerland and pressured the banks they used to encourage clients to declare their untaxed assets. Swiss law forbids bank employees from passing account data to third parties, unless the bank’s clients or Switzerland’s tax authority approves the disclosure.

Herve Falciani, the technician accused of stealing client data in 2008 from HSBC’s Geneva office and passing it to French authorities was indicted in Switzerland on charges of industrial espionage and violating bank secrecy laws. HSBC was charged in France last month with money laundering throughtax fraud and illegal marketing in a case stemming from the data theft. The bank faces a similar investigation in Belgium and last month agreed to pay $12.5 million to settle claims with the Securities and Exchange Commission that its Swiss private-banking unit solicited U.S. investors without being registered.

12/21/14 Fortune of fraud: Top 5 biggest payouts to federal whistleblowers in 2014 by Saskia de Melker 

Whistleblowers who file false claims lawsuits can receive up to 30 percent of the money that a company pays to the government, which added up to $435 million in whistleblower rewards primarily for mortgage, health care and defense fraud cases.

JP MORGAN
$614 million “for violating the False Claims Act by knowingly originating and underwriting non-compliant mortgage loans submitted for insurance coverage and guarantees by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs,” according to the Department of Justice.
Whistleblower’s share: $63.9 million will go to Keith Edwards, a former assistant vice president supervising a government insuring unit for JP Morgan, for providing tips that led to the company’s agreement to pay $614 million.

Bank of America
Bank of America To Buy MBNA For $35 BillionSettlement: $16.65 billion – the largest civil settlement with a single entity in American history — “related to the packaging, marketing, sale, arrangement, structuring and issuance of RMBS, collateralized debt obligations, and the bank’s practices concerning the underwriting and origination of mortgage loans.”

Whistleblower’s share: Former Countrywide Financial executive Edward O’Donnell is collecting more than $57 million for helping federal prosecutors force Bank of America to pay $16.65 billion for its role in churning out shoddy mortgages and related securities before the financial crisis.

TAX CHEATS

 

Swiss Bankers Association

In 2013, Switzerland still held 26 percent of global offshore assets, or US$2.3 trillion, according to an analysis by Boston Consulting. 
Switzerland will abandon its long-prized banking secrecy in 2017 when it starts automatically exchanging account details with other countries, and with it goes one of the main attractions of placing money in its banks. Nicolas Pictet, president of the Geneva Financial Center, which represents hundreds of banks and financial companies. For generations, investors have paid Swiss banks high fees to hide their money from tax authorities around the world.  Private Swiss banks are looking for new sources of revenue, but they have also faced probes and massive fines from countries accusing them of abetting tax dodging. The Swiss National Bank and the People’s Bank of China also reached a bilateral swap agreement — a currency exchange deal — in July 2014.

Luxleaks: Former PwC employee admits he took files: The French whistle-blower Antoine Deltour (28) said he did not intend to leak Luxembourg tax documents to media. He was arressted for theft and “violation of business secrets.” Switzerland and Luxembourg are the only western countries where violation of banking or business secrets are an offence, according to Liberation. “I progressively discovered the reality of the system… the massive practice of fiscal optimisation,” he said. “I didn’t want to contribute to that.” Luxleaks 2 (published in December) includes files from Deloitte, KPMG and Ernst & Young, the other members of the “big four,” he notes. Mr Deltour says it is unfair that Luxembourg and PWC should be the only country and the only auditors subjected to scrutiny. “These practices are systematic,” he says. “I don’t like the term ‘fiscal optimisation’ because it’s a question of aggressive fiscal planning practiced by certain states, of complex strategies practised on an industrial scale by certain firms.”

12/9/14 “Comfort Letters” – that Luxembourg provides to corporations seeking favorable tax treatment.

Pepsi, IKEA, FedEx and 340 other international companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg, allowing many of them to slash their global tax bills while maintaining little presence in the tiny European duchy, leaked documents show. These companies appear to have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars through Luxembourg and saved billions of dollars in taxes, according to a review of nearly 28,000 pages of confidential documents conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a team of more than 80 journalists from 26 countries. Big companies can book big tax savings by creating complicated accounting and legal structures that move profits to low-tax Luxembourg from higher-tax countries where they’re headquartered or do lots of business. In some instances, the leaked records indicate, companies have enjoyed effective tax rates of less than 1 percent on the profits they’ve shuffled into Luxembourg.

CHEATER: LUXENBOURG SWISS FINANCE BRANCH CONCEPT

 

"LUX LEAKS" DISCLOSE SECRET TAX STRUCTURES BY BIG 4 ACCOUNTING FIRMS
PricewaterhouseCoopers Ernst & Young, Deloitte and KPMG
Deals for Disney, Koch Brothers Empire FedEx, Pepsi, IKEA and 340 other globe-spanning companies.
The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became A Tax Haven For Fat Cats And Big Business by Brooks. Richard ( 2013 ) Paperback

12/9/14 Luxembourg tax files: how Juncker's duchy accommodated Skype and the Koch empire

Video Guardian reporter Rupert Neate attempts to track down the staff of Arteva Europe
New leaked documents reveal more firms using Grand Duchy for favourable tax arrangements, putting pressure on EC president, Jean-Claude Juncker.
Juncker has faced mounting criticism, including a censure vote in the European parliament, in the wake of the first document leak. The Guardian, together with the ICIJ and more than 20 other news organisations worldwide, revealed that about 340 companies – including Fedex, Pepsi, Shire Pharmaceuticals, Icap and Ikea – had secured tax deals with Luxembourg with the assistance of accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Last week, the finance ministers of Germany, France and Italy demanded a clampdown on Luxembourg-based tax avoidance in a letter to the EC’s commissioner for economic affairs, Pierre Moscovici. They said: “Our citizens and our companies expect us to cope with tax avoidance and aggressive planning.” The latest batch of documents show that the creation of aggressive tax structures is not limited to PwC alone. The new papers include similar deals secured for big clients by the remaining members of the big four group of accounting firms – EY, Deloitte and KPMG.

9/6/14 Apple's burden: a mountain of money it can't really use

US companies are sitting on vast piles of untappable cash, held overseas for tax purposes. at the end of June, Apple had $164.5bn of "cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities" on its balance sheet – up a heady $18bn on just nine months earlier. The vast majority of that money – $137.7bn – is held by Apple's foreign subsidiaries. From September 2013, its overseas cash mountain increased by $26bn.  In April, US Trust, a private bank, calculated that Apple's hoard, then $159bn (£97bn), was more than twice the UK's cash reserves, which stand at $70bn, or roughly equivalent to Britain's annual spending on education and housing combined.  Only $8.3bn of Apple's stash is actually in hard cash. The rest is invested in government and corporate securities and other investments. Its biggest holdings are $35.5bn in US treasury bonds and $73bn in corporate securities. Apple also holds sizable investments in foreign countries' debt, commercial paper-based and mortgage-backed securities, all controlled by its own fund management group, Braeburn.  This giant portfolio is bigger than the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, which manages about $150bn. But Braeburn Capital – named after the apple – is not run from Wall Street. It is based in Reno, the capital of Nevada, a state where there is no corporation tax or capital gains tax.
Apple's big problem is that so much of its liquid assets are held overseas, with profits booked in low-tax countries such as Ireland. If it moved the money to the US, the Internal Revenue Service would demand about a third of it. Back in April 2013 Apple got around this inconvenience by borrowing $17bn in the biggest corporate bond offering on record as part of its promised $55bn payout to shareholders by the end of next year. The pledge helped to win over Icahn.  With all that cash in reserve, Apple was able to raise the money at super-low interest rates – it paid far less than it would have had to pay in tax if it had chosen to repatriate cash to fund the buyback. Professor Edward Kleinbard of the University of Southern California argues that Apple's net cost was next to nothing, because it also earns interest on its overseas holdings.  But paying out cash to shareholders does nothing about almost $140bn sitting untouched overseas.

How Rich Exploit Tax Haven Loopholes

 

7/8/14 SECRECY FOR SALE: INSIDE THE GLOBAL OFFSHORE MONEY MAZE  

New Bank Leak Shows How Rich Exploit Tax Haven Loopholes
The individuals include donors to the British government, which has been outspoken against tax havens, and some of the most prominent people in British life. Offshore secrets of the UK's wealthy political donors The first in a series revealing the offshore links of the elite, as obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, names party donors who have given six-figure sums.

4/4/13 Bill Black: An international collaboration of investigative journalists has released the names of wealthy individuals stashing as much as three times the American GDP in tax havens. 

Secrecy For Sale Report, shows banks became better at fraud. publicintegrity.org

UK government assets should not be transferred offshore.

Quote of the day: offices of UK tax tribunal owned offshore

The attorney-general’s offshore office Tax havens, Issue 1383
Government departments have been under orders not to transfer assets offshore. But if their landlords do, there’s little they can do about it and once again the new owners get to pick the taxpayer’s pocket using their favourite tax haven.
“Buildings occupied by the Ministry of Justice, including Britain’s tax tribunal, are – almost unbelievably – owned offshore in a Mediterranean tax haven, while the attorney-general works from a London office that is owned in a tax haven in the British West Indies, the Eye has discovered.” The MoJ’s financial, tax and land tribunals centre in a leafy Bloomsbury square is actually owned in Gibraltar. Anchorage House is owned through a 200-year lease from the London Docklands Development Corporation by Isle of Man company Eid Ltd. It in turn leases the premises to the government, forcing taxpayers to pay rent offshore.  Meanwhile, a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament, at 20 Victoria Street, sits the country’s most senior lawyer in offices owned by a company based in Anguilla, a tax haven in the British West Indies.

British journalist Nicholas Shaxson on how corporations and the wealthy use offshore banks and tax havens to avoid paying taxes and other governmental regulations.

"Tax havens have grown so fast in the era of globalization since the 1970s that they have become at the heart of the global economy and are absolutely huge," Shaxson says. "Anywhere between $10 trillion and $20 trillion are sitting offshore. Half the world trade is processed in one way or another through tax havens." Shaxson is the author of the new book, "Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens." Ordinary people have to make up for the lost taxes from the wealthy.

International Bankers provide Offshore Banking and American Laws allow Tax Havens which are the the secret underpinning for the political and financial power of wall street, which Congress never talks about when they discuss taxes.

Nicholas Shaxson @nickshaxson
Journalist and author of bestselling tax havens book Treasure Islands. Following the money, following my nose (and holding it) Zurich · treasureislands.org

2/24/2014 G-20 agrees on automatic tax data sharing: OECD

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
The new standard would see countries automatically exchange information gathered from their financial institutions. Group-of-20 nations agreed to implement a global standard for automatically exchanging information between tax authorities by the end of 2015. The endorsement is a step toward putting an end to "banking secrecy as we know it," Pascal Saint-Amans. A decision on the technology needed and detailed rules on how governments will swap tax data is likely to be made at a G-20 meeting in September, he said. The OECD, supported by 34 member countries including the US, UK, Germany and Japan, is working on plans for a global exchange of information to crack down on tax-avoidance strategies used by companies such as Google Inc, Apple Inc and Yahoo! Inc. While the group doesn't have figures to calculate the total cost of overseas tax avoidance, the British Virgin Islands was one of the top five investors in Russia and China, Saint-Amans said. The accumulated profit of US companies held offshore was $2 trillion, he said.  
Change rules  "The political message is that we will be closing down all the loopholes," he said. "What multinationals are doing is legal. If it's legal and you don't like the outcome, you need to change the rules."  Global tax rules currently aren't fit for the 21st century, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said on Sunday in an interview on Channel 7 in Sydney.  "If we can come up with common rules that we all sign up to then these companies are going to have to operate within these rules," Osborne said.  The timescale to implement the plan is "ambitious," Paul Radcliffe, a director in financial services at accounting firm Ernst & Young LLP, said in a statement.  "Given the looming deadline, financial institutions will need to start the process to become compliant," he said.

 

1/22/14 Report Says China’s Elite Use Offshore Companies

Members of the Chinese elite, including some of the country’s most politically connected figures, have set up a large number of offshore companies that allow them to conceal billions of dollars abroad, according to a& report released Wednesday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a Washington-based group that works with a number of news organizations around the world.

 

Corporate Tax Avoidance
tax subsidies on corporations grass roots movement.

12/19/13 Private Eye's superb dig into French-domiciled owner of Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere.

Via BVI, Bermuda, Switz, Jersey
Tax avoidance: a capital idea! Lord Rothermere, Issue 1355

[. . . Trustees of a trust A 2003 application for planning permission for changes to the property, including an extension for a swimming pool, made in the names “Lord and Lady Rothermere” indicates that this was an offshore vehicle for the Rothermeres. The following year, the house was sold again for £8.5m with the new owners now given on Land Registry documents as Lord and Lady Rothermere themselves, subject to charge, almost certainly relating to a loan, from private bankers Hoare & Co. A clause in the title document suggest the Rothermeres did not become owners outright but as trustees of a trust. Such are the undemanding requirements of British property registration and the secrecy of trusts that its location and beneficiaries are secret.  The Rothermeres’ affairs appear to be run largely by accountant David Nelson of Dixon Wilson, who replaced Lord Rothermere on title documents for the Addison Road house - and thus, it appears, as a trustee alongside Lady Rothermere - in September 2010.  More recently what is almost certainly the trust behind the property was (unusually) named when a footnote in a DMGT financial results announcement last month mentioned that in the previous year the company “disposed [sic] certain assets for consideration of £0.1 million to The Addison Road Settlement whose trustees are Lady Rothermere, wife of the company’s chairman and David Nelson, a non-executive director of the company”. ]

 

THE RICH HAVE THE MONEY TO PAY THE WHITE SHOE LAWYERS

• 11/12 Offshore secrets: British Virgin Islands, land of sand, sea and secrecy Microstate is now the world's biggest provider of offshore entities, yet the UK refuses to step in and force it to reform​
• The Financial Secrecy Index ranks jurisdictions according to their secrecy and the scale of their activities. A politically neutral ranking, it is a tool for understanding global financial secrecy, tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions, and illicit financial flows. 2013 Report​
• Dubai - Financial Secrecy Report 2013
• 4/3/13 Leaks reveal secrets of the rich who hide cash offshore
  Exclusive: Offshore financial industry leak exposes identities of 1,000s of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world
• Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze Files shed light on nearly 22,000 tax haven clients from Hong Kong and mainland China.
• 1/21/14 China's princelings storing riches in Caribbean offshore haven
• Corporate tax evasion called “But Nobody Pays That.” David Kocieniewski Pulitzer Prize Reporter. He described sifting through the tax code as “Sudoku for investigative reporters.” His reporting uncovered a vast array of tax loopholes and subsidies afforded to large enterprises.

12/19/14 Offshore tax probe seeks data from Panama firm

2015 What Do Tom Brady And A Kazakh Banking Mogul Have To Do With The Affordable Housing Crisis?
Offshore companies that hid his identity
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/03/02/3628511/housing-affordability-wealthy-money-laundering/
For someone with large sums of cash that can’t be declared officially or spent openly because it came from criminal activity, the chance to funnel tens of millions of dollars into legitimacy through a real estate transaction is very attractive. Buyers with the means to afford housing like this and the desire to keep their ownership out of the public eye also tend to pay for their $20 million homes in cash, avoiding mortgage paperwork that would facilitate public understanding of who is buying what.

Stash Pad The New York real-estate market is now the premier destination for wealthy foreigners with rubles, yuan, and dollars to hide.
http://nymag.com/news/features/foreigners-hiding-money-new-york-real-estate-2014-6/

According to data compiled by the firm PropertyShark, since 2008, roughly 30 percent of condo sales in large-scale Manhattan developments have been to purchasers who either listed an overseas address or bought through an entity like a limited-liability corporation, a tactic rarely employed by local homebuyers but favored by foreign investors. With a little creative corporate structuring, the ownership of a New York property can be made as untraceable as a numbered bank account. An inquiry by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a Washington-based nonprofit, has uncovered numerous cases in which New York real estate figured in foreign financial- and political-corruption scandals. “It’s something that is never discussed, but it’s the elephant in the room,” says Rosabianca. “Real estate is a wonderful way to cleanse money. Once you buy real estate, the derivation of that cash is forgotten."
The Wealth Report.”
The latest edition produces the curiously precise estimate that there are 167,669 individuals in the world who are “ultrahigh net worth,” with assets exceeding $30 million. “Of course, the big question is: are the rich getting richer?” the report asks. It answers gleefully in the affirmative, forecasting that over the next decade, the ranks of the ultrarich will increase by 30 percent, with much of the growth coming in Asia and Africa.  This new global wealth is being lavished on the usual status items—planes, yachts, contemporary art—but Knight Frank is pleased to report that the rich favor real estate most of all. Real estate can serve as a convenient pied-à-terre, an investment hedge against a wobbly home currency, or an insurance policy—a literal refuge if things go bad. Other financial centers boast a similar mix of glamour and apparent security—Knight Frank’s list of the top-ten “global cities” includes London, Paris, Geneva, and Dubai—but New York is forecast to add more ultrahigh-net-worth individuals than any city outside Asia over the next decade.

NEW YORK – The multiyear federal crackdown on wealthy Americans who duck taxes by hiding income and assets offshore is targeting a Panamanian legal services firm suspected of arranging anonymous banking services.

A Manhattan federal judge on Friday approved special summonses for Sovereign Management & Legal. The approval also covered summonses for Federal Express, DHL, UPS, Western Union, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Clearing House Payment and HSBC, firms and institutions Sovereign may have used to send funds to its clients. Investigators use the so-called John Doe summonses when they suspect a company may be facilitating illegal activity but do not know the names of the firm's clients. The summonses demand that the recipients disclose the identifying information and data. "By issuing these John Doe summonses, we continue our joint efforts with the IRS to identify and hold accountable those who conceal their foreign assets in order to dodge their legal responsibility to pay taxes," said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

The summonses mark the latest development in a sweeping investigation that initially focused on evidence that Swiss banking giant UBS secretly sent employees into the U.S. on tourist visas to help American clients evade taxes. Opening major cracks in Switzerland's traditional banking secrecy, UBS in 2009 agreed to pay $780 million in a deferred-prosecution deal and provide financial data for nearly 4,500 U.S. clients. Federal authorities subsequently expanded the investigation to focus on banks and other institutions in Luxembourg, Israel, the Caribbean and elsewhere. The probe so far has produced dozens of convictions of Americans who hid their wealth offshore, and hundreds of millions of dollars in back taxes, interest and penalties.

IRS unlocks UBS vault hiding Americans evading taxes - USATODAY.com

Sovereign has helped clients with the incorporation of offshore companies from an office in the Caribbean island of Nevis since 1996, a federal court filing shows. In 2002, the company created a management and legal services company in Panama that provides more than 30 offshore structures designed to provide maximum secrecy, the filing shows. "These packages involve various combinations of bank accounts owned by entities, which are in turn owned by other entities, all in different jurisdictions and all controlled by nominees on behalf of the beneficial owner," according to the memorandum of law filed Wednesday. Sovereign's website refers to such arrangements as "breaking the paper trail," and offers to help clients "avoid foreign account reporting requirements that many countries now have (such as the USA and Germany)," the filing shows. Federal prosecutors said the summonses were approved for Federal Express, DHL and other companies because IRS investigators determined that Sovereign used the firms' services "to transmit funds to and from clients in the U.S." Additionally, the IRS probe determined that the wire services operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Clearing House, as well as U.S. correspondent bank accounts HSBC maintained for foreign financial institutions, are likely to have records of financial transactions between Sovereign and its American clients.

JULIAS BAER

TAX HAVENS

STRUCTURED CAPITAL MARKETS

 Bank Secrecy is a cash cow in Switzerland.

- Tax evasion, or forgetting to declare income, isn't a crime in Switzerland, and banks aren't required to inform authorities of funds that may be undeclared.

- SEE PDF Swiss banks manage 27 percent of the $7.3 trillion in offshore global assets, the biggest market share ahead of the U.K.'s Channel Islands with 24 percent and Luxembourg with 14 percent, according to the bankers association. http://web.archive.org/web/20100821173201/http://www.swissbanking.com/20081223-300-bro-wealthmanagement2009-rva.pdf

- Julius Baer Investors or Julius Baer Investment Management (JBIM) , Julius Baer Bank & Trust Company (JBBT), Caymans, Baer Select Management, JBIM New York and JBIM London to benefit from the offshore system” to escape tax.

- 2002 Zurich-based Julius Baer Holding AG and Vontobel Holding AG, which cater to millionaires, owe 8% to 13% of their market value to the banking secrecy law, according to a 2005 study sponsored by the University of Zurich and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

 

Swiss bank Julias Baer crafty strategy shows how difficult it is to clamp down on tax havens 
elaborate international tax avoidance schemes by the SCM (Structured Capital Markets) division of Barclays. 
http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/

According to these documents, Barclays has been systematically assisting clients to avoid huge amounts of tax they should be liable for across multiple jurisdictions. The Evening Standard has examined how 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. It shows the scale of the task facing tax inspectors here and in the US in an offshore purge. 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.
Julius Baer Holding traces its origins to Bank Julius Baer, founded in 1890, and has served private clients ever since. After opening its first foreign unit in 1940, the bank expanded internationally and now has offices in London, Luxembourg, Milan, Frankfurt, Vienna, Dubai, Grand Cayman, Los Angeles and New York. The small bank, with about 2,000 employees, caters to ultrawealthy individual clients.

Baer Select in the Caymans.
http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/Swiss_bank%27s_crafty_strategy_shows_how_difficult_it_is_to_clamp_down_on_tax_havens/

Baer Select was in fact a shell. London does the real investment management. He said: “The investment manager is sitting in London; they do the deals out of London.”
Bank Julius Baer vs. Rudolf Elmer - Dec 2007 case against Swiss / Cayman whisteblower Rothschild Bank AG was established in Zurich by members of the British and French Rothschild families in 1968. Since then, it has grown into an international private banking group with offices and representatives in major cities around the world, serving a varied international client base.
Head Office
Rothschild Bank AG
Zollikerstrasse 181
8034 Zurich
Switzerland
Telephone: + 41 44 384 7111

Other Private Banking companies
Rothschild Trust Group Companies
Rothschild Private Management Ltd
Rothschild Vermögensverwaltungs-GmbH
Equitas SA (Geneva) 
Rothschild Bank (CI) Ltd

Julius Baer (Hong Kong) Ltd.
Investment Advisory Company
18/F Two Exchange Square
8 Connaught Place, Central
Tel. +852 2899 4788
Fax +852 2899 4789

 

SWISS LAW CURRENTLY ALLOWS FOR BANK SECRECY TO BE LIFTED ONLY WHEN THERE'S A CRIMINAL OFFENSE, SUCH AS TAX FRAUD OR MONEY LAUNDERING

Tax Fraud is a Crime but Tax Evasion is not considered a crime in Switzerland.

 

UBS, the IRS and Phil Gramm
UBS's offshore accounting practices helped American citizens hide $18 billion from the IRS. As many as 19,000 accounts according to the IRS. American arm of UBS Investment Bank, the Swiss-based bank. IRS Director Charles Rossotti warned Congress about an epidemic of tax cheating which had reached $195 billion a year. UBS admitted conspiring to help clients conceal assets from the Internal Revenue Service.
UBS imbroglio this week. New York Times reported: Prosecutors suspect that from late 2002 to 2007, UBS helped American clients illegally hide $20 billion, letting them evade $300 million a year in taxes. In a striking admission, UBS said that from 2000 through 2007, some of its private bankers and managers had "participated in a scheme to defraud the United States" and the I.R.S. by helping American clients set up and conceal offshore accounts. The scheme involved falsifying or not properly obtaining or filing certain tax forms required of both the bank and its clients. As it turns out, that time frame just happens to coincide with the arrival of Phil Gramm at UBS Warburg. An investigation into the criminal activity of 52,000 wealthy Americans whom the authorities suspected of using secret offshore accounts at the bank to dodge taxes. U.S. prosecutors want it to lift the veil of Swiss banking secrecy, but Swiss financial privacy laws bar the disclosure of client names.

Excerpts

Swiss Suffer Secrecy Loss to Sustain Money Management (Update1) Tax Havens Around the World The end of banking secrecy, first time Switzerland lifted its banking secrecy laws, allowing UBS to pass on client data to avoid U.S. criminal charges. Switzerland can't ignore U.S. demands because UBS and Credit Suisse Group AG earned more revenue in the Americas from 2004 to 2007 than they did in their home market, company reports show. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2009-03-06/KFZL3X0D9L3601

Foreign Bank Account, Offshore Private Banking, Private Banking
Start by becoming a world citizen. World Service Authority Passport.
Indentity Freedom and Asset Protection is to Own Nothing and to Control Everything. Own your own Offshore Bank Account.

The U.S. Treasury and Justice Department have finally broken through the super confidential Swiss banking system and the IRS will be assessing some large civil and criminal penalties against U.S. individuals and businesses in the coming months. Blake Christian discusses the Swiss banking system.

 

THE BAIL OUT

The OECD has accused the offshore financial centers of squirreling away between US$5 trillion and US$7 trillion of domestically taxable income. Some of the biggest U.S. corporations, are some of the biggest users of the tax havens to avoid paying the IRS, the group's report says including several that have taken federal bailout funds. They include Citigroup, the Bank of America and Morgan Stanley, all of which registered dozens of tax havens in just one Caribbean tax haven alone, the Cayman Islands. All three financial firms have also taken billions of dollars in bank bailout funds. Tax Havens
 

Form D filings

Margie Burns Form D filings show that hedge funds connected to Marvin P. Bush -- youngest brother of former president George W. Bush, former GOP finance chairman in Virginia, and head of a northern Virginia hedge fund—raised over $1,612,000,000 ($1.6 billion) by filing deadline. More Form D filings from March 12 show another $7.8 billion raised by Bush companies, companies directed by Bush co-directors, or spin-off companies. The total is almost $10 billion raised by Bush-connected hedge funds.
Following up on earlier posts-- In a set of coordinated transactions little reported so far, hedge funds connected to Marvin P. Bush, youngest brother of George W. Bush, quietly raised almost $10 billion on two days in March. The transactions were Form D sales on March 12 and March 16, 2009
Investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were previously regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2010 They were both changed into bank holding companies. The change of status means both companies will come under the direct regulation of the Fed, which oversees the nation's bank holding companies. The banking subsidiaries of the two institutions will face the stricter regulations that commercial banks are required to meet. http://www.margieburns.com/blog/_archives/2009/4/14/4153094.html

 

Tax Havens

1695 Pirate Every eluded capture. He briefly sheltered in New Providence, a known pirate haven. Now New Providence is the most populous island in the Bahamas, containing more than 70% of the total population. It also houses the national capital city, Nassau.

• Bahamas, Cayman islands, Cook Islands, Dominican Republic, Israel, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Panama, Philippines
  Russia, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines
• British Virgin Islands transshipment point for South American narcotics destined for the US and Europe; large offshore financial center makes it vulnerable to money laundering.
• Dutch Central Bank (DNB) exclude some of these and count 12,500 Special Financial Institutions (SFIs) THE NETHERLANDS IS A TAX HAVEN PDF However, the majority of SFI transactions can be attributed to a small group of multinationals that control about 100 to 125 SFIs, and have
  offices of their own. The SFIs mainly function as conduits for dividend, royalty and interest payments. It has been found that out of the 42,072 financial holding companies registered in the Netherlands for which information on the (ultimate) parent was available, 5,830 are managed by trust companies. Of these mailbox companies, 43% have a parent in a tax haven jurisdiction such as the Netherlands Antilles, Switzerland, Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands or the Cayman Islands. Hence there is a clear link to tax havens for conduit structures.

The use of differing tax laws between two or more countries to try to mitigate tax liability is probably as old as taxation itself. In Ancient Greece, some of the Greek Islands were used as depositories by the sea traders of the era to place their foreign goods to thus avoid the two-percent tax imposed by the city-state of Athens on imported goods. It is sometimes suggested that the practice first reached prominence through the avoidance of the Cinque ports and later the staple ports in the twelfth and fourteenth centuries respectively. In 1721, American colonies traded from Latin America to avoid British taxes.

Various countries claim to be the oldest tax haven in the world.
For example, the Channel Islands claim their tax independence dating as far back as Norman Conquest, while the Isle of Man claims to trace its fiscal independence to even earlier times. Nonetheless, the modern concept of a tax haven is generally accepted to have emerged at an uncertain point in the immediate aftermath of World War I.[6] Bermuda sometimes optimistically claims to have been the first tax haven based upon the creation of the first offshore companies legislation in 1935 by the newly created law firm of Conyers Dill & Pearman.[7] However, the Bermudian claim is debatable when compared against the enactment of a Trust Law by Liechtenstein in 1926 to attract offshore capital.[8]
Until the 1950s, tax havens were used to avoid personal taxation but since then jurisdictions have come to focus on attracting companies with low or no corporate tax. Centres which focus on providing financial services to corporations rather than private wealth management are more often known as offshore financial centres.

This strategy generally relied on double taxation treaties between large jurisdictions and the tax haven, allowing corporations to structure group ownership through the smaller jurisdiction to reduce tax liability. Although some of these double tax treaties survive. Most tax havens have a double monetary control system which distinguish residents from non-resident as well as foreign currency from the domestic one. In general, residents are subject to monetary controls but not non-residents. A company, belonging to a non-resident, when trading overseas is seen as non-resident in terms of exchange control. It is possible for a foreigner to create a company in a tax haven to trade internationally; the company's operations will not be subject to exchange controls as long as it uses foreign currency to trade outside the tax haven. Tax havens usually have currency easily convertible or linked to an easily convertible currency. Most are convertible to US dollars, euros or to pounds sterling.

• Personal residency. Since the early 20th century, wealthy individuals from high-tax jurisdictions have sought to relocate themselves in low-tax jurisdictions. In most countries in the world, residence is the primary basis of taxation – see Tax residence. In some cases the low-tax jurisdictions levy no, or only very low, income tax. But almost no tax haven assesses any kind of capital gains tax, or inheritance tax. Individuals who are unable to return to a high-tax country in which they used to reside for more than a few days a year are sometimes referred to as tax exiles.
• Asset holding. Asset holding involves utilizing a trust or a company, or a trust owning a company. The company or trust will be formed in one tax haven, and will usually be administered and resident in another. The function is to hold assets, which may consist of a portfolio of investments under management, trading companies or groups, physical assets such as real estate or valuable chattels. The essence of such arrangements is that by changing the ownership of the assets into an entity which is not resident in the high-tax jurisdiction, they cease to be taxable in that jurisdiction. Often the mechanism is employed to avoid a specific tax. For example, a wealthy testator could transfer his house into an offshore company; he can then settle the shares of the company on trust (with himself being a trustee with another trustee, whilst holding the beneficial life estate) for himself for life, and then to his daughter. On his death, the shares will automatically vest in the daughter, who thereby acquires the house, without the house having to go through probate and being assessed with inheritance tax.^[13] (Most countries assess inheritance tax (and all other taxes) on real estate within their jurisdiction, regardless of the nationality of the owner, so this would not work with a house in most countries. It is more likely to be done with intangible assets.)
• Trading and other business activity. Many businesses which do not require a specific geographical location or extensive labor are set up in tax havens, to minimize tax exposure. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the number of reinsurance companies which have migrated to Bermuda over the years. Other examples include internet based services and group finance companies. In the 1970s and 1980s corporate groups were known to form offshore entities for the purposes of "reinvoicing". These reinvoicing companies simply made a margin without performing any economic function, but as the margin arose in a tax free jurisdiction, it allowed the group to "skim" profits from the high-tax jurisdiction. Most sophisticated tax codes now prevent transfer pricing scams of this nature.
• Financial intermediaries. Much of the economic activity in tax havens today consists of professional financial services such as mutual funds, banking, life insurance and pensions. Generally the funds are deposited with the intermediary in the low-tax jurisdiction, and the intermediary then on-lends or invests the money (often back into a high-tax jurisdiction). Although such systems do not normally avoid tax in the principal customer's jurisdiction, it enables financial service providers to provide multi-jurisdictional products without adding an additional layer of taxation. This has proved particularly successful in the area of offshore funds.
• The FATF Blacklist was the common shorthand description for the Financial Action Task Force list of "Non-Cooperative Countries or Territories" (NCCTs); that is, countries which it perceived to be non-cooperative in the global fight against money laundering and terrorist financing. Although non-appearance on the blacklist was perceived to be a mark of approbation for Offshore Financial Centres (or "tax havens") who are sufficiently well regulated to meet all of the FATF's criteria, in practice the list included countries that do not operate as offshore financial centres. The FATF used to update the Blacklist regularly, designating countries to be added or deleted.[1] As of November 2009 [update], there are no officially listed NCCTs and hence the Blacklist has become defunct. The term "non-cooperative" was sometimes criticised as misleading, as a number of the countries which appeared on the list simply lacked the infrastructure or resources to cope with relatively sophisticated financial criminals who try to operate there. Since 2008 the FATF has begun, at the behest of the G20 Leaders, a different and more analytical process of identifying countries and jurisidictions displaying strategic deficiencies in their anti- money laundering and anti- terrorist financing regimes. [ 2011 ]

SWIFT

2011 BANKS ROLE IN TERRORISM - NOW YOU CAN TRANSFER YOUR MONEY THROUGH THE INTERNET TO ANY COUNTRY

Supports routing bank numbers (national bank number) of currently ninety countries!
For an international bank transfer, you need a SWIFT Code (BIC Code) and the IBAN Code. The IBAN Code is an international bank account number and consists of the Bank Sort Code and the account number. Please note the different syntax of the IBAN countries To calculate an IBAN Code, IBAN calculator. Search and find national Sort Code, BIC Code, SWIFT Code. Simply enter the sort code or parts of the bank code into the search box below. Example: "RBOSGB2W" for a SWIFT code or "83-00-01" alternative "830001" for a Sort code UK .
You are looking for a bank? Enter the name of the bank just below e.g. "UBS AG" or "ICICI Bank" or "RBS United Kingdom" for the Royal Bank of Scotland and select the bank branch or the head office of the bank. Also try "Deutsche Bank New York" or "Deutsche Bank AG Head Office"

DOUBLE IRISH

DUTCH SANDWICH

 

America's 35% corporate tax rate.

I was reading an article that Google enjoys a 2.4 percent tax rate on its overseas operations.  Can you believe that?  A hugely successful and profitable company pays just 2.4 percent in taxes, and it is perfectly legal!  What is even more amazing is that the average tax rate in the overseas countries that Google operates is over 20 percent. The process in which Google follows to reap the rewards of tax avoidance is very complex.  One method is called the 'Double Irish'.  It involves profits being sent to Ireland, which actually has quite a high tax rate.  But wait, Ireland doesn't tax certain payments made to other European Union states, so the money then has to be routed a shell Google office in the Netherlands.  Once the money is in the Netherlands, it is home free, because the Dutch have fantastic tax laws.  So, the money is then diverted to an Irish owned subsidiary nestled in Bermuda.  (Now you understand the name Double Irish.)  The best part?  Google only paid .2 percent of taxes along the way.  What a deal!!!  For Google that is…  If you want to sound like a tax guru at your next party, you can also refer to this method of tax avoidance as the 'Dutch Sandwich', or the “Dutch Sandwich Tax”.

It seems that, during the 1970s, yet something else that was pioneered were various tax avoidance sc--- I mean "strategies to minimize your tax exposure" and "strategies for wealth protection" or "alternative investment strategies" and the like. One of these was a cute technique called the "Dutch Sandwich." What you do, is "merger to pool overseas resources, hide [the] profits in an Amsterdam bank, then use complex 'flow-through' subsidiaries to bring the untaxed lucre back into.... U.S. banks." This is called the Dutch Sandwich because the client's money is "sandwiched" between a sham corporation based in Amsterdam and a sham trust in Curacao (Dutch Antilles); the scheme allows the client's money to be brought back into the United States disguised as untaxable "loans" from the offshore bank (Russo, Gus. SuperMob: How Sidney Korshak And His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers. New York, 2006. pp.402-403).
One banker who worked at Curacao's Credit Lyonais Nederland Bank, said that he had no problem helping U.S. companies and individuals dodge their taxes. He said, "Many of your largest corporations, many of your movie stars, do much the same thing here. We wouldn't want to handle criminal money, of course. But if it's just a matter of taxes, that is of no concern to us" (ibid, p.403). Yes, movie stars also use this service.
In a footnote of page 403 Gus Russo wrote: "The tax dodge courtesy was also offered to millionaire movie stars, who have since become incorporated in the Netherlands and receive their income as tax-free loans. With Wasserman [movie mogul, powerbroker, conglomerate business empire builder-type of decades past] viewed as the most adept at the offshore schemes, many top actors had still one more huge incentive for signing up with MCA." Was http://hubpages.com/hub/Politics-As-Surfing-The-Search-For-Objective-Truth-Part-Eleven

Central Banks

Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, Head Office, Cayman Islands Cayman Islands CIMA Central Bank
Shedden Road 80e, Elizabethan Square, Grand Cayman Map
KY1 - 1001 George Town (Grand Cayman)
Post office box:10052
George Town
Telephone numbers: +1345(0) 9497089, Main LineFax numbers: +1345(0) 9492532 E-Mail: admin@cimoney.com.ky

Agricultural Development Bank of China, Anqing Branch, China ADBC (Beijing)
Renmin Road 417
246003 Anqing (Anhui)
www.adbc.com.cn
Head Office
Yuetanbei Street A2, Xicheng District
100045 Beijing

Co Kildare BoI Asset Management, Retail Bank (351 branches worldwide)
Athy (Kildare)
Lower Baggot Street
2 Dublin (Dublin County Borough)
Telephone numbers: +353 (0) 1/ 6615933
Fax numbers:+353 (0) 1/ 6615671
www.bankofireland.ie

Correspondent banks

• HKD: The Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited
• DKK: Danske Bank A/S
• CHF: Credit Suisse AG

International Banking Center of Shanghai China

 

Money - Rixdollar vs. Dollar

Today, USD notes are made from cotton fiber paper, unlike most common paper, which is made of wood fiber. U.S. coins are produced by the United States Mint. U.S. dollar banknotes are printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and, since 1914, have been issued by the Federal Reserve.
The Constitution of the United States of America provides that the United States Congress shall have the power "To coin Money".[14] Laws implementing this power are currently codified in Section 5112 of Title 31 of the United States Code. Section 5112 provides in which forms the United States dollars shall be issued.[15] Those coins are both designated in Section 5112 as "legal tender" in payment of debts.[15] The Sacagawea dollar is one example of the copper alloy dollar. The pure silver dollar is known as the American Silver Eagle. Section 5112 also provides for the minting and issuance of other coins, which have values ranging from one-hundredth of one dollar to fifty dollars.[15] These other coins are more fully described in Coins of the United States dollar.
The Constitution provides that "a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time".[16] That provision of the Constitution is made specific by Section 331 of Title 31 of the United States Code.[17] The sums of money reported in the "Statements" are currently being expressed in U.S. dollars (for example, see the 2009 Financial Report of the United States Government).[18] The U.S. dollar may therefore be described as the unit of account of the United States.
The word "dollar" is one of the words in the first paragraph of Section 9 of Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. In that context, "dollars" is a reference to the Spanish milled dollar, a coin that had a monetary value of 8 Spanish units of currency, or reales.

Central Bank of the Bahamas - Bahamian dollar

The Bahamian dollar is pegged to the U.S. dollar on a one-to-one basis. The Central Bank of The Bahamas states that it uses reserve requirements, changes in the Bank discount rate and selective credit controls, supplemented by moral suasion as main instruments of monetary policy, the objective of which is to keep stable conditions, including credit, in order to maintain the parity between the U.S. dollar and the Bahamian dollar while allowing economic development to proceed. Although the U.S. dollar (as any other foreign currency) is subject to exchange control laws in The Bahamas, the parity between Bahamian dollars and U.S. dollars means that any business will accept either U.S. or Bahamian currency and many of the businesses that serve tourists have extra U.S. dollars on hand for the convenience of American tourists.

1500 brought the earliest europeans

 

1600 The Early European Colonies

France, Spain, England Netherlands, Sweden

New France: Starting at the Saint Lawrence River, explored by by Jacques Cartier in 1534, to the cession of New France to Spain and Britain in 1763. At its peak in 1712 (before the Treaty of Utrecht), the territory of New France extended from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains and from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. The territory was then divided in five colonies, each with its own administration: Canada, Acadia, Hudson Bay, Newfoundland (Plaisance), and Louisiana. The Treaty of Utrecht resulted in the relinquishing of French claims to mainland Acadia, the Hudson Bay and Newfoundland colonies, and the establishment of the colony of Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) as the successor to Acadia.
France ceded the rest of New France to Great Britain and Spain at the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years War (the French and Indian War). Britain received all lands east of the Mississippi River, including Canada, Acadia, and parts of Louisiana, while Spain received the territory to the west – the larger portion of Louisiana. Spain returned its portion of Louisiana to France in 1800, but the French sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, permanently ending French colonial efforts on the North American mainland.

BY 1600 ENGLISH PIRATES WERE SELLING SELLING OPIUM IN CHINA AND SLAVES IN THE CARIBBEAN

 

1630 HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF MEDFORD, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, FROM ITS FIRST SETTLEMENT, IN 1630

Elihu Yale Born in Massachusetts near Boston then taken to London at the age of three, educated there, and never returned to America. In 1671 Yale began working for The East India Company and arrived the following year in Madras. From a fairly low-ranking position he worked his way up by 1687 to become governor of Fort Saint George, The East India Company's installation at Madras. He was eventually removed on the account of self-aggrandisement at company expense, but Elihu Yale still returned with a sizable fortune to England. In London he entered the diamond trade.

DIRECTOR of the the British East India Company, eventually becoming governor of Fort Saint George, Madras, in 1687. He amassed a great fortune from trade and returned to England in 1699. Yale made his first gift (a donation of 32 books) to the institution in 1713, when it was known as the Collegiate School at Saybrook. Later, in 1718, Cotton Mather wrote to Yale, hinting broadly that the Saybrook school—which had recently moved to New Haven—could be renamed in Yale's honour in gratitude for another sizable gift.
Yale responded with a gift of more books, a portrait of George I, and a variety of textiles from The East Indies. The gifts were sold in Boston for some £800, and the money was used to construct a building called Yale College in New Haven. After subsequent bequests, Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in 1718. By its charter of 1745, the entire institution was named Yale University. Yale was buried at Wrexham in North Wales. On April 5, 1999, the university recognised the 350th anniversary of his birthday.

 

Maryland and later Virginia
We left Virginia in 1624. Virginia grew steadily under King Charles the First. In 1632 he granted the area north of the Potomac River to his friend, Lord Baltimore, who was a Roman Catholic. This proprietary colony was named Maryland after Lord Baltimore's wife, and it became a haven for English Catholics who were persecuted even more than the Puritans in England. By 1660, the tidewater region of Chesapeake Bay was largely settled with tobacco farms and plantations.
With the English Civil War and Puritan rule thereafter, it was the turn of the Anglican royalists to escape to the new world. Many young nobles emigrated to Virginia and founded upper class families like the Washingtons, the Randolphs, the Madisons, and the Lees. However most Virginians were small farmers. They sought land further and further west, in the piedmont region at the base of the Appalachian Mountains. By 1700 they reached the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley.

• Church Ownership of Virginia Land Records
• The English Empire - The first successful British colony was Jamestown, Virginia, founded 1607
• Early development of Virginia - King James the First succeeded Elizabeth in 1603. He chartered two companies, one in London and one in Plymouth, to colonize Virginia.

The Virginia Company of London sent Settlers.

The English settlers built the James Fort as a secure place to live. A settler named John Rolfe married Pocahontas, the daughter of the Algonquian Indians Chief. Rolfe also discovered that tobacco from the West Indies was an ideal crop for Virginia. Increasing amounts of this cash crop were sold to England, establishing the colony as a commercial enterprise. The London Company supported the colony by giving grants of land to wealthy Englishmen, who would transport at least 250 workers to Virginia. Thus new plantations grew up along the rivers and coasts, each with its own access to the sea.
SLAVERY: Many of these workers were indentured servants who became free to obtain their own land after five to seven years of labor.

In JULY 1619, the Virginia colony elected the first representative assembly in America, the House of Burgesses was held in Jamestown, the first such assembly in the Americas.
The House of Burgesses was empowered to enact legislation for the colony, but its actions were subject to veto by the governor, council, and ultimately by the directors in London.

• The governor, who was appointed to his position by the company officials in London
• The governor's council, six prominent citizens selected by the governor
• The burgesses (representatives) from various locales, initially the larger plantations and later in Virginia history from the counties.

Despite this growth, an Indian massacre in 1622 killed one third of the settlers. Due to this disaster, the English Crown dissolved the London Company, and the King ruled Virginia directly as a crown colony, though the House of Burgesses was retained.

In 1624, Virginia became a royal colony.

 

 

The House of Burgesses continued to meet, but its influence became severely restricted. Despite limitations on its actions, the assembly listed within its later ranks such notables as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, and would assume a major leadership role in the movement toward independence.

Henry Soane (1622-1661) was a Virginia politician and landowner. He served in the House of Burgesses 1652–55, 1658, and 1660 - 61, and was its Speaker in 1661.^[1]He is also the great-great grandfather of Thomas Jefferson.Henry Soane, bapt. 17 Nov. 1622, Brighton, Sussex, England – d. ca. 1661/2, James City Co. Va.; m. ca. 1642/3, Lewes, Sussex. He emigrated to Virginia around 1651, settling in James City County along the Chickahominy River.

English merchants meet to discuss the formation of an English East India Company

Henry Soane. Given the connections between Carewe and Soame, and between them and Crane, it seems reasonable to suggest that Henry Soane was of the Soame family aforementioned.

"The founder of this family in Virgina was Col. Henry Soane. His English origin is unknown but a family of that name was long settled in the county of Suffolk. The year of Col. Henry Soane's arrival in Va. is not known but on 11-31-1651 he was granted 297 acres in James City Co. on the east side of the Chickahominy River known as 'Hoggs land' for importing Henry Soane Sr., Henry Soane Jr.; Judith Soane Sr.; Judith Soane Jr.; and Elizabeth Soane to the colony. (Nugent- 222).

The Colonial Virginia Register
A list of Governors, Councillors and Other Higher Officials, and also of Members of the House of Burgesses, and the Revolutionary Conventions of the Colony of Virginia --- Compiled by William Glover and Mary Newton Standard, published by Joel Munsell's Sons, Publishers, Albany, New York, 1902.

John Pory, 1619
[From 1619 to 1642 there is no record of Speakers]
Thomas Stegg, 1642-3
Edward Hill, Sr., 1644-45, 1654, 1658-9
Edmund Scarborough, November, 1645
Ambrose Harmer, October 1646
Thomas Harwood, 1648-49
Edward Major, April 1652
Thomas Dew, November 1652
William Whitby, 1653
Francis Moryson, 1655-56
John Smith, March, 1657-58
Theoderick Bland, 1659-61
Henry Soane, 1660-61
Robert Wynne, 1661-74
Augustine Warner, March 1675-6; February 1676-7
Thomas Godwin, June 1676
William Travers, 1677
Matthew Kemp, 1679
Thomas Ballard, 1680-82
Edward Hill, Jr., 1684
Arthur Allen, 1686
Thomas Milner, 1691-93
Robert Carter, 1696, 1699
William Randolph, 1698
Peter Beverely, 1700-05, 1710-1714
Benjamin Harrison, October, 1705
Daniel McCarty, 1715-18
John Holloway, 1720-34
Sir. John Randolph, 1736
John Robinson, 1738-65
Peyton Randolph, 1766-75

Fairfax: John West, Jr., George Mason (Mason Dixon Line)
Finecastle Virginia

Finecastle Resolution: Arthur Campbell, William Russell (Russell County, Virginia
In 1776 Capt. John Shelby (under the command of Col William Russell) had a company of militia stationed on the Frontiers of Fincastle Co. At this time the Watauga area was mistakenly thought to be part of Finecastle Co., VA.

Russell & Co. partner and co-founder Samuel Russell was the great-grandson of William Russell, a trustee of Yale University from 1745 to 1761. Skull & Bones founder William Huntington Russell was also the great-grandson of William Russell, a trustee of Yale University from 1745 to 1761.

(Opium Pirate and Funder of Yale College and Skull and Bones)

Fincastle Resolution : From: Settlement of the Appalachian Frontier includes Arthur Campbell, William Russell.
"We assure you, Gentlemen, and all our countrymen, that we are a people whose hearts overflow with love and duty to our lawful sovereign George III. whose illustrious house, for several successive reigns, have been the guardians of civil and religious rights and liberties of his subjects, as settled at the glorious Revolution; that we are willing to risk our lives in the service of his Majesty, for the support of the Protestant religion, and the rights and liberties of his subjects, as they have been established by compact, law, and ancient charters. We are heartily grieved at the differences which now subsist between the parent state and the colonies, and most ardently wish to see harmony restored, on an equitable basis, and by the most lenient measures that can be devised by the heart of men."

---

Berkeley County : now in West Virginia ..... Russell County, Virginia 1860

CAMPBELL FAMILY. 25
"At a meeting of the British Parliament, on the 20th day of January, 1775, Lord Dartmouth, Sec- CAMPBELL FAMILY. 25 retary of State for the Colonies, laid before the House of Peers all the papers relative to the American Colonies. As soon as the papers were read, William Pitt, the undying friend of the American Colonies, arose and moved that an ad- dress be presented to the King, requesting him to direct General Gage to move His Majesty's forces from tbe town of Poston. He said : 'America could not be reconciled, she ought not to be reconciled to this country, till the troops of Britain are removed from the continent. Eesistance to your acts was necessary, and therefore just; and your vain decla- ration of the omnipotence of Parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be equally impotent to convince or enslave America. You may, no doubt, destroy their cities ; you may cut them off from the superfluities, per- haps the conveniences of life ; but, my Lords, they will still despise your power, for they have yet re- maining their woods and their liberty.' He says that the spirit that now animates America was the same that led to the Revolution in England, and that the friends of liberty on both sides of the Atlantic had but one common cause. *In this great cause,' he continued, 'they are immovably allied; it is the alliance of God and Natui-e; "im- mutable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of heaven." ' His Lordship admitted the right of Parliament to control the complicated machinery of commerce and navigation, but denied its authority over the property of the people of the Colonies ; 'property is private, individual, absolute, the touch of another annihilates it.' He besought the House to rest upon that distinction, their principles of taxation, and to confine tlie exercise of parliamentary author- ity to the regulation of commerce. Of the Conti- nental Congress the noble Earl spoke in a strain of the highest eulogy. 'History, my Lords,' he said, Tias been my favorite study, and in the celebrated writings of antiquity I have often admired the patriotism of Greece and Rome; but, my Lords, I must declare and avow that in the master states of 5 HISTORICAL SKETCHES. the world, I know not the people or the Senate, who in such a complication of difficult circum- stances can stand in preference to the delegates of America assembled in General Congress at Phil- adelphia. I trust it is obvious to your Lordships, that all attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism over such a mighty Continental nation, must be in vain, must be futile.' The speaker went on to say that min- isterial maneuvers would never be able to resist such a nation as that of America, that the hour of danger was not to be averted by tricks of office, that matters had gone so far that even repeal- ing the obnoxious Acts would not restore the lost confidence of America, unless his Majesty's armed force was withdrawn from the continent. The noble Lord pledged himself, that they would one day find themselves compelled to undo all their oppressive acts. He advised them, therefore, to enter at once into that course of their own ac- cord, which they must be ultimately forced to adopt. 'To conclude, my Lords,' he said, 'if the ministers persevere in misadvising and mislead- ing the King, I will not say that they can alienate the alTections of his subjects from the Crown; but I will affirm, they will make the Crown not worth his wearing, I will not say that the King is be- trayed, but I will pronounce that the kingdom is undone.' The motion of Lord Chatham was re- jected by a large majority, and the British Min- istry declared their purpose never to abandon a single right until the American Colonies were whipped into obedience.

The same day, January 20, 1775, that William Pitt delivered the preceding address m the House of Lords, the backwoodsmen of Fincastle County, Virginia, met (pursuant to the resolves of the Continental Congress), at the Lead Mines, their county seat, and took
action in the premises; of which the following is a correct account

" In obedience to the resolves of the Continental Congress, a meeting of the Freeholders of Fincastle Couuty, in Virginia, was held on the 20th day of January, 1775, who, after approving of the association framed by that august body in be half of all the Colonies, and subscribing thereto, proceeded to the election of a Committee, to see the same carried punctually into execution, and the following gentlemen were nominated : the Kev. Charles Cummings, Colonel ^Villiam Preston, Colonel William Christian, Captain Stephen Trigg, Major Arthur Campbell, Major William Ingles, Captain Walter Crockett, Captian John Montgomery, Captain James McGavock, Captain William Campbell, Captain Thomas Madison, Captain Daniel Smith, Captain William Russell, Captain Evan Shelby and Lieutenant William Edmoudson.

The Jesuits were going to destroy America as determined by the sinister Councils at Vienna, Verona, and Chieri, and it was during the Presidency of Andrew Jackson that they began to apply their treachery in full force. These Jesuits moved among the American people and looked just like Americans. They were, in fact, American citizens, but their loyalty was to the pope of Rome. Their purposes were those of the papacy. These people were traitors and a serious threat to the continued existence of the United States.

George Washington:
George Washington was born at Pope's Creek, Westmoreland County, Virginia. He was of British descent, his great-grandfather, John Washington, having migrated from Sulgrave Manor, Northamptonshire, in 1657. Largely self-taught, he began his career as a land surveyor, but inheriting the Mount Vernon estate from his brother Lawrence, Washington settled down as a country gentleman.
An experienced soldier, he had fought in campaigns against the French during the French and Indian War. He was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses 1759 and was a leader of the Virginia militia, gaining valuable exposure to wilderness fighting. As a strong opponent of the British government's policy, he sat in the Continental Congresses of 1774 and 1775, and on the outbreak of the American Revolution was chosen commander in chief of the Continental army. After many setbacks, he accepted the surrender of British General Cornwallis at Yorktown 1781.
In 1758 Washington resigned command of the Virginia troops and married a rich widow, Martha Custis. The union of their plantations made Washington one of the wealthiest men in his state. He entertained lavishly, and thus came into contact with notable men from all over the British colonies in America. He was elected in 1759 to the Virginia House of Burgesses, and re-elected. John Adams proposed Washington as commander-in-chief of the colonial armies and on 15 June 1775 Washington took over the command.

 

ST. CROIX U.S.V.I.

After the war Washington retired to his Virginia estate, Mount Vernon, but in 1787 he re-entered politics as president of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and was elected US President 1789. He attempted to draw his ministers from all factions, but his aristocratic outlook and acceptance of the fiscal policy championed by Alexander Hamilton (BORN IN ST. CROIX, U.S.V.I) ADVOCATE OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A NATIONAL BANK alienated his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, who resigned 1793, thus creating the two-party system.

Alexander Hamilton (BORN ON NEVIS but RAISED ON ST. CROIX, U.S.V.I)
USVI is maintained as a "free port" in a separate customs zone. Dutch, French, English, Knights of Malta, Spain, Danish West Indian Company owned St. Croix. The U.S. The purchase by the U.S. occurred in 1917.

Friedensthal in St Croix 1777
The Dutch, along with some French Protestant refugees from the Catholic-dominated portion of St. Christopher (St. Kitts) settled in the harbor area of Bassin, now the present day Christiansted, while the English located themselves on the western part of the island in what is now Frederiksted. Philippe de Lonvilliers de Poincy, a strongman official of the Knights of Malta, dispatched 160 of his best troops and succeeded in deceiving the Spanish garrison to capitulate and sail for San Juan. He then promptly sent three hundred planters from St. Christopher to establish, the now renamed, St. Croix. Knights of Malta is the Roman Catholic military arm of the Vatican based in Rome, Italy and the world's oldest order of chivalry. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is widely considered a sovereign subject of international law.

 

Alexander Hamilton
St. Croix was devastated by a major hurricane which destroyed or damaged some 500 buildings in 1772 and Alexander wrote a long and vivid letter to his father on St. Vincent island describing the horror.  The letter was published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, and so impressed friends and others that they scraped together enough money to send him on his way to school in the British Colonies in North America. 

Letter Written By Alexander Hamilton To His Father After The St. Croix Hurricane of 1772

Royal Danish American Gazette

Honored Sir. I take up my pen just to give you an imperfect account of the most dreadful hurricane that memory or any records whatever can trace, which happened here on the 31st  at night. 

 It began about dusk, at North, and raged very violently till ten o'clock.  Then ensued a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour.  Meanwhile, the wind was shifting round to the South West point, from whence it returned with redoubled fury and continued so till near three o'clock in the morning.  Good God! what horror and destruction - it's impossible for me to describe - or you to form any idea of it.  It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place.  The roaring of the sea and wind-fiery meteors flying about in the air - the prodigious glare of almost perpetual lightning - the crash of the falling houses - and the ear piercing shrieks of the distressed, were sufficient to strike astonishment into Angels.  A great part of the buildings throughout the Island are leveled to the ground - almost all the rest was very shattered - several persons killed and numbers utterly ruined - whole families running about the streets unknowing where to find a place of shelter - the sick exposed to the keenness of water and air - without a bed to lie upon - or a dry covering to their bodies - our harbour is entirely bare. In a word, misery in all its most hideous shapes spread over the whole face of the country - a strong smell of gunpowder added some what to the terrors of the night; and it was observed that the rain was surprisingly salt.  Indeed, the water is so brackish and full of sulphur that there is hardly any drinking it.

My reflections and feelings on this frightful and melancholy occasion are set forth in following self-discourse. 

Where now OH! Vile worm, is all thy boasted fortitude and sufficiency? - why dost thou tremble and stand aghast? how humble - how helpless - how contemptible you now appear.  And for why? the jarring of the elements - the discord of clouds?  Oh, impotent presumptuous fool!  How darest thou offend that omnipotence, whose nod alone were sufficient to quell the destruction that hovers over thee, or crush thee into atoms?  See thy wretched helpless state and learn to know thyself . . .

Hark! ruin and confusion on every side. - 'Tis thy turn next: but one short moment - even now - Oh Lord help - Jesus be merciful! 

Thus did I reflect, and thus at every gust of the wind did I conclude. - till it pleased the Almighty to allay it. 

I am afraid, sir, you will think this description more the effort of imagination than a true picture of realities. But I can affirm with the greatest truth, that there is not a single circumstance touched upon which I have not absolutely been an eyewitness to.

 

Alexander Hamilton WAS ADMITTED TO KINGS COLLEGE NOW COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY which at the time had a faculty of only three persons.

<> COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY WAS STARTED WITH OPIUM MONEY<>

1754 ENGLAND: KING GEORGE III STARTS KING COLLEGE LATER KNOWN AS COLUMBIA COLLEGE THEN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Virginia's House of Burgesses issues resolutions May 16 rejecting Parliament's right to tax British colonists. The Virginia governor dissolves the House of Burgesses, but its members meet in private and agree not to import any dutiable goods.

Washington's Presidency

As president, Washington alienated his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, who resigned in 1793, by accepting the fiscal policy hampioned by Alexander Hamilton and overseeing the payment of the foreign and domestic debt incurred by the new nation. He also shaped the powers of the presidency, assuming some implied powers not specified in the Constitution-among them, the power to create a national bank, and the introduction of an excise tax. Hamilton helped defeat the tax revolt of western farmers in 1794 CALLED THE Whiskey Rebellion
The Whiskey Rebellion demonstrated that the new national government had the willingness and ability to suppress violent resistance to its laws. The whiskey excise remained difficult to collect, however. The events contributed to the formation of political parties in the United States, a process already underway. The whiskey tax was repealed after Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party, which opposed Hamilton's Federalist Party, came to power in 1800. (tarring-and-feathering tax collectors)

 

In 1917, the United States purchased St. Croix, St. John and St. Thomas from the Danish government to prevent their becoming a German submarine base during World War I.

St. Croix first fell under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Navy and was later granted Territorial status.

Christiansted National Historic Site - Danish Customs House
Kings Wharf
Christiansted, VI 00820-4611
(340) 773-1460

St. Croix Landmark Society

St. Croix Landmark Society Library Catalog

Preserving St. Croix's Heritage Since 1948
52 Estate Whim Frederiksted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands 00840
by Isidore Paiewonsky
was http://www.stcroixlandmarks.com/%28S%28ghsqqp45fh431kizkjeieg55%29%29/default.aspx/MenuItemID/249/MenuGroup/Home.html

Governor Peter von Scholten had freed the slaves on St Croix.
Peter Carl Frederik von Scholten (May 17, 1784 – January 26, 1854) was Governor-General of the Danish West Indies from 1827 to 1848. He was born in Vestervig, Thy, Denmark as the son of captain Casimir von Scholten and Catharina Elisabeth de Moldrup. In 1827, he became acting governor general of St. Thomas. From 1835 to 1848, he became governor general for all three islands, Saint Thomas, Saint Croix, and Saint John, giving him virtually absolute command of the islands. In this period he showed himself a patriarchal ruler trying to lighten the burden of the slaves and to cushion the racial tensions. He did this by creating schools for them, as well as permitting them private ownership. Regardless, von Scholten was opposed to Christian VIII of Denmark's idea that every child born of an unfree woman should be free from birth, as he felt that such an arrangement could cause displeasure and envy with serious consequences. When this was brought into effect, he felt himself proven right as a slave rebellion broke out on St. Croix in 1848. Peter von Scholten responded by, on July 3, 1848, emancipating all slaves in the Danish West Indian Islands.
During his early years on St. Thomas, von Scholten enjoyed engorging on many Spanish pigs, including Chorizo and having a wealthy life. Due to his position as customs officer during the surge in trade under the state of war between the nearby Spanish islands and the South American colony insurgents.
At this time, Peter von Scholten lived with Anna Heegaard (1790–1859) a woman of color.Consensus among scholars today is that Anna Heegaard influenced von Scholten to a more humane treatment of the Blacks. "Anna Heegaard's mother was the 'free mulatto woman,' Susanna Uytendahl, born in St. Croix about 1774. Susanna was the illegitimate daughter of Charlotte Amalie Bernard, a slave woman, and Johannes Balthazar, eldest son of Lucas Uytendahl, Baron de Bretton. "Charlotte Amalie Bernard, (Anna's grandmother) was born in St. Croix, about 1753. She is supposed to be identical with the Negro woman, Amalie, or Charlotte Amalie, who appears in the Government Register several times. She was the property of Baron de Bretton.
Note: The Brettons were descendants of Hugenots, (French Protestants), who had come to the West Indies in the late 17th Century to escape religious persecution. Originally they had settled in St. Christopher, then in St. Thomas. Later, they moved to St. Croix. According to archive material, the Brettons, on their mother's side, were descended from an old French noble family whose last representative was Admiral Jean Grace de Bretton. The Admiral, in turn was a direct descendant of another distinguished French Noval leader, Coligny. Admiral Jean Grave was related also to the families de Witt and Ruyter of Holland. With this 'fighting blood" in her veins, it is little wonder that Anna Heegaard was in the forefront of the battle to effect drastic reforms in the social system of the Danish West Indies.

Anna Heegaard mistress of Governor General Peter von Scholten by Isidore Paiewonsky

Ownership of Estate Whim Plantation St. Croix Virgin Islands

There is still much to discover about the personal lives of the people who lived and worked at Whim Plantation from 1743 until the government purchase in 1932. Research has been undertaken and various papers and at least one book have been written, primarily about the owners. Historians George Tyson and Svend Holsoe are among the few actively seeking information specifically about Whim. The stories of the workers and their relationships are still in research at this time. For the latest information about these people and their times contact the St. Croix Landmarks Society for current publications in this field. The record of owners as we know it now, follows:
1743:the first recorded owner was William Payne, probably Irish. The census shows he had seven slaves on the property,whose names were not recorded. Payne set up a small village of 6 houses and probably harvested the trees for sale off island.

<SNIP>

 

1809: Isaac Hartman, Sr., became the new owner. It was an amazing trade for all of the people of Whim were uprooted and moved to Lime Tree and Lime Tree's work crew and manager took their places at Whim. It is from this era onward that we can successfully trace many of the enslaved people and free workers to families in the neighborhood today.
The Hartman family of Lime Tree had been in the Caribbean for at least 3 generations by 1809. Their fortunes had flourished and the large family spared no effort to keep themselves in lavish comfort. Isaac Hartman, Sr. was an absentee owner, living in London who began borrowing on Whim as soon as he got control of it.

But St. Croix reached it peak sugar cane production soon after, as competing plantations were being opened up in Cuba, Brazil, the southern states of the USA and even in Asia. Then beet sugar was discovered, a final blow.

The elder Hartman died in 1814, owing about 10,000 pounds sterling, mostly to his son-in-law in St. Croix. The youngest Hartman, Stedman, aged 30, was managing the estate; he lived with his family at nearby Orange Grove. Three years later a fever epidemic cause the loss of many lives and hard times began. The Hartmans lost one estate because of debt and had to sell Orange Grove; the entire family moved into the Greathouse at Whim. Stedman had three babies under the age of five to worry about when a hurricane in 1819 left many injured, homeless or dead all over the island. The storm flattened Whim and the Hartman fortunes went down with it. Between 1820 and 1839 , the title to Whim was in the hands of creditors although Stedman Hartman managed the property most of those years.

1820: the Tutein brothers; Mr. Black's widow; Baring Brothers & Company.

The slavery connections of Northington Grange “A real and material source of wealth and power” Alexander Baring on Britain's slave colonies in the Caribbean (1831) The research follows the 2007 survey by Miranda Kaufmann on the family history of 33 English Heritage properties and their slavery connections. Using databases on slave voyages and slave compensation, Kaufmann's study focused on those who owned property in slave colonies, held government office in such colonies, invested in slaving or traded in slave produced goods, were engaged in abolitionist debates or legal decisions on slavery, or who owned black servants.

The Saint Croix Census of 1841 provides a detailed vision of the enslaved labour force who worked on the Baring estates of Upper Bethlehem and Fredensborg 121 Producing sugar and rum, the estate at Upper Bethlehem had around two hundred slaves while that at Fredensborg had just under three hundred slaves. The greater unevenness in age and gender distributions at Upper Bethlehem is perhaps because its earlier connection to the Lower Bethlehem estate had enabled considerable internal transfers of slaves. Source: Saint Croix Census of 1841 121 St. Croix Population Database 1734–1917, Virgin Islands Social History Associates

I am pretty confident that the people would not quietly submit to it – they are now looking forward to the 3 of October, as the time when they shall be free from such compulsory residence, asserting that they will only then consider themselves as free. Still I cannot find that any intend to leave… they say they will continue to live there and work, but I could not get them to agree on what terms or what wages; what I offered they did not refuse but said it was soon enough to make agreement when time come.12

SAINT CROIX CONNECTION
Samuel Wadsworth Russell, born in Middletown, Connecticut (August 25, 1789 – 1862), was an American Opium trader, and founder of Russell & Company, the largest and most important American trading house in China from 1842 to its closing in 1891. Russell is cousin of William Huntington Russell (1833) who was Co-founder of the Skull and Bones Secret Society at Yale University. Russell Sturgis (1805-1887), who later became head of Baring Brothers Bank in London. Warren Delano, Jr., the grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt (32nd President of the United States) served as the Chief of Operations of Russell and Company in Canton. John Murray Forbes was born in Bordeaux, France. His parents were Ralph Bennet Forbes and wife Margaret Perkins, niece of Thomas Handasyd Perkins, founder of a Boston Brahmin family merchant dynasty involved in the China trade. His brother was Robert Bennet Forbes (1804-1889), sea captain and China merchant was a devoted opium pirate. John Murray Forbes supplied money and weapons to New Englanders to fight slavery in Kansas and in 1859 entertained John Brown.

 

1820 TRANSER MONEY THROUGH FORWARDING AGENTS TO ANY COUNTRY

The Postal History and Markings of The Forwarding Agents COPENHAGEN, Denmark LIVERPOOL, Great Britain LONDON, Great Britain

OPENHAGEN, Denmark

• A. A. Aspegren
• David Aubrey, P. Walker
• S. Black Bros. & Co.
• J. H. Brant
• C. A. Fouthin
• S. Hecksher
• J. H. Hedeman
• Peter Tutein

LIVERPOOL, Great Britain

1 - 104 Includes:

• Baring Bros & Co.
• Baring Bros.
• Baring Bros.
• Jno. & Sam. Brown
• Wm. Brown
• Brown, Shipley & Co.
• Jno. & Sam. Brown
• Wm. Brown
• Brown, Shipley & Co.
• # J. Hardman & Co.
  # Harnden & Co.
  # Postage Paid to Destination by Harnden & Co.
  # Harnden & Co. (Ship) No. 6 Cook St.
  # Harnden & Co. (Ship) No. 20 Water St.
  # Harnden & Co. of Liverpool Have paid postage, To Liverpool, Transatlantic, To be collected, By Harnden & Co. of US
  # Postage Paid to Boston,
  # Messrs H & Co. will please forward as directed, H. & Co.

LONDON, Great Britain

• Baring Bros & Co.
• Baring Bros & Co.
• Baring Bros & Co.
• Baring Bros.

 

 

 

1769
Frankfurt Main money lender and coin dealer Meyer Amschel Rothschild hangs a gold-lettered sign in front of his shop September 21 reading, "M. A. Rothschild, by appointment court factor to his serene highness Prince Wiliam of Hauau" (see 1764). Now 26, Rothschild next year will marry 17-year-old Gutele Schaper, who will bear his five sons (Amschel, Salomon, Nathan, Kalman [Karl], and Jacob) and five daughters (see 1801; Nathan, 1799).

Religion, just like ethnicity, was also not used for any categorisation purpose. Austrian nobility could belong to any of the religions within the Habsburg empire, such as Roman Catholic nobles in Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Poland, Protestants in Bohemia and Transylvania, Greek Catholics in eastern Galicia, Orthodox Serbs in Vojvodina, as well as nobles of Jewish faith.

No Taxation without Representation

 

 

 

A Summary of the 1765 Stamp Act
Stamp Act Teapot
The Stamp Act was passed by the British Parliament on March 22, 1765. The new tax was imposed on all American colonists and required them to pay a tax on every piece of printed paper they used. Ship's papers, legal documents, licenses, newspapers, other publications, and even playing cards were taxed. The money collected by the Stamp Act was to be used to help pay the costs of defending and protecting the American frontier near the Appalachian Mountains (10,000 troops were to be stationed on the American frontier for this purpose).
The actual cost of the Stamp Act was relatively small. What made the law so offensive to the colonists was not so much its immediate cost but the standard it seemed to set. In the past, taxes and duties on colonial trade had always been viewed as measures to regulate commerce, not to raise money. The Stamp Act, however, was viewed as a direct attempt by England to raise money in the colonies without the approval of the colonial legislatures. If this new tax were allowed to pass without resistance, the colonists reasoned, the door would be open for far more troublesome taxation in the future.
Few colonists believed that they could do anything more than grumble and buy the stamps until the Virginia House of Burgesses adopted Patrick Henry's Stamp Act Resolves. These resolves declared that Americans possessed the same rights as the English, especially the right to be taxed only by their own representatives; that Virginians should pay no taxes except those voted by the Virginia House of Burgesses; and that anyone supporting the right of Parliament to tax Virginians should be considered an enemy of the colony. The House of Burgesses defeated the most extreme of Henry's resolutions, but four of the resolutions were adopted. Virginia Governor Fauquier did not approve of the resolutions, and he dissolved the House of Burgesses in response to their passage.

CHINA Opium Trade

Sassoon's building projects helped Malcolm & Co. since they were all built on concrete pilings that this company constructed. Bothwell, was an architect and built many of Shanghai's buildings. He built both the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, Customs House, and the Bank of China.

 

English -- William Jardine: "Iron-Headed Old Rat" died in England, in 1843, at age 57. His illness was long and painful, and many felt this was because of his opium trades. Over thirty million (30,000,000.00) pounds of opium were imported into China in the 1870's, and most of it came through Shanghai's port gates. Jardine's partner in crime, James Matheson got Jardine's old seat in the Parliament, bought an island off the coast of Scotland and built a castle. He lived to the age of 91. Matheson's nephew, Donald Matheson, was a major opponent of the opium trade and worked for charitable causes. He was chairman of the executive committee for the Society of Suppression of the Opium Trade.
The largest of the "country traders'' was Jardine, Matheson & Co. William Jardine and James Matheson formed a partnership in 1828. Matheson was the first to see the potential of smuggling along the entire Chinese coast. Matheson blamed the Chinese dislike for "free trade'' to their "marvellous degree of imbecility and avarice, conceit and obstinacy.'' Jardine was nicknamed "Iron-Headed Old Rat'' by the Chinese. He advocated making the REAL TREASURE ISLAND aka Formosa aka TAIWAN an offshore base for the Western powers. He was also one of the most vocal advocates for war, stating:

"Obtain us but a sale for our goods, and we will supply any quantity.... Nor indeed should our valuable commerce and revenue both in India and Great Britain be permitted to remain subject to a caprice which a few gunboats laid alongside this city would overrule by the discharge of a few mortars.... The results of a war with China could not be doubted.''

Both returned to England, and became members of Parliament. Matheson used his opium fortune to become the second largest landholder in Great Britain, and was made a Baron by Queen Victoria. One obstacle to war, was Sir George Robinson, the British Superintendent of Trade in Canton. He applied to England for orders, which would authorize him to stop British opium smuggling, which, of course, he never received. He suggested, in February 1836, that "a more certain method would be to prohibit the growth of the poppy and manufacture of opium in British India.'' He was fired by Palmerston, then British Foreign Secretary, for this. Robinson's replacement was Captain Charles Elliot of the Royal Navy, who had been spying all along on Robinson for Palmerston. Elliot had previously been involved in designing the plan for ``freeing'' the slaves throughout the British Empire, which Henry Carey exposed, as being carried out in such a way, as to have what he termed "disastrous consequences.'' In Jamaica, following an "emancipation'' of the slaves, the effect was to drive down wages and living standards for both the former slaves, and imported Indian laborers.
By the late 1830's, there was no doubt that opium was leading to the destruction of China. By 1836, opium shipments were more than 30,000 chests, enough to supply 12.5 million smokers. The Chinese imperial army lost a battle against local rebels because the army was addicted to opium. The financial drain on China was disrupting the entire economy. From 1829 to 1840, Chinese exports had brought in 7 million silver dollars, but imports, mainly opium had drained 56 million. The loss of silver was disrupting the internal economy leading to increased unrest.

 

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