Search for $1B Stolen from Moldova Leads to Ex-Council Flat in Scotland
bbc.com
bbc.com
Prime Minister David Cameron told a conference in
Singapore in July: "We are one of the most open and
welcoming economies anywhere in the world and I want
Britain to be that country. But I want to ensure that all
this money is clean money. There is no place for dirty
money in Britain."
With motoring offences in the UK, if a car is fined the owner identifies the driver so the driver can be fined - and if the owner claims they "don't know who was driving", the owner gets the fine. So you can't dodge a fine or get a lesser fine by "forgetting".
We should apply the same logic to white collar crimes. If lawyers or corporate service providers are setting up companies with fake details, acting as directors then claiming they "don't know who controls the company", whatever punishments are due to the company's owners should transfer to whoever touched it last.
Quite right - that's what the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man are for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corpora...
[3] http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2011/02/london-corporati...
> But barrister Jonathan Fisher, QC, one of Britain's
> leading experts in this area of law, says that legally,
> nominees would be as responsible as
> any other director for any wrongdoing.I'm sure he does not expect anyone to actually ask him to enforce his promise[1]. I doubt if he takes himself seriously, when doing statements like the one mentioned.
To quote "Yes, PM"[2]:
Hacker: Humphrey, do you see it as part of your job to help ministers make fools of themselves?
Sir Humphrey: Well, I never met one that needed any help.
[1] https://www.google.gr/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es...
[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yes,_Minister#Episode_Six:_The...
Wait, what?? If Fortuna United is part of the fraud (its unclear to me if it is or isn't), then she should definitely be guilty (IMHO):
She says she and Mikalauskas not only set up Fortuna United, they are directors of the two firms behind it
Fortuna United is a limited partnership made up of two Seychelles companies - Brixton Ventures Ltd, whose director is Mikalauskas
Zirnelyte says suitable stamps can be bought on the online auction site eBay.
Zirnelyte says she knows who ultimately controlled Fortuna United, though she cannot reveal their identity.
She says her firm did not ask "details of the business" of the companies they set up.
She says she and Mikalauskas were just "nominee directors". She adds: "Nominee director is just an official representative for the authorities, and he is not involved in anything." - you know, authorities like the police
A director "has to understand what the company is doing, he has to be involved in the management of the company".
etc
But.. I don't know enough about this particular case and it seems that the law allows it.
But they won't, because white collar crimes affect the politicians, whereas traffic fines affect the general population. If they cracked down on white collar crime, many of their donors would end up in jail. And we can't have that, can we?
(If you've never heard of Private Eye, it combines irreverent humour and hard-hitting investigative journalism, and has been the first to break many of the biggest stories in the British press)
Like a domain registration they also usually provide anonymity by declaring themselves as your office address. That's legitimate too as many contractors don't have an office and don't want thier home address published publicly on the uk companies register. That isn't a fraud.
The BBC makes much of the weird ownership structure, but it is not that crazy. The structure described, 2 companies that basically represent people owning a company that basically does work is a tax efficiency. If the co owners own it directly and take thier money as pay not dividend, they pay more tax. If they take it as dividend not pay, it is split by ownership not hours worked. Better for both directors to be companies that charge the main company per hour for work done and then extract the dividend from those personal company seperately. I wouldn't do it as it has some problems like disguised employment but if compliant it is a tax efficiency not an evasion, and not a criminal activity.
I dunno, it's like saying a secure document destruction company is suspicious. It's just a company that provides a service that most users need to do normal productive business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_Trust_Center_(CT_C...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/business/how-delaware-thri...
> Zirnelyte says suitable stamps can be bought on the online auction site eBay.
How is a stamp from eBay an "official Seychelles stamp"? Does it just mean the stamps officially used by the Seychellois shell companies to "sign" things, rather than by the government of Seychelles? The way it was said sounds very fraudulent to me (even for a shell company mill), as if they forged the Seychelles registration docs. The image shown appears to be two bland stamps with the same design, each with a company name and a shared address in Seychelles (and from Googling the address, it looks like that's another company registration agent.)
Interestingly "money laundering" is reserved, though.
What does it even mean to say that Fortuna Limited "has the rights to the billion dollars which disappeared last year"?