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Comment by felipeerias | Hacker News Reader

The UK is the second country with the most intermediaries (banks, accountants, lawyers…) listed in the Panama papers. The first one is Hong Kong, a former British colony.

"More than half of the companies listed in the leaked Mossack Fonseca documents are registered in the U.K. or its overseas territories [...] If we want to understand modern Britain, we first need to realize that our primary economic function in the world today is probably our network of tax havens."

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/04/britains-empire-of-tax-e...

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Tax havens, hmm?

So around the world, basically, the good honest career politicians from Argentina to Zambia are going around to profitable businesses saying "hey, nice business you have there! We'd like to take, say, 50% of your profits, if you don't mind, and spend it on our friends - government contractors, public-sector unions and the like. All the donations to our campaign afterward are purely incidental, I assure you, and none of the subsidies or handouts we'll use your money for are vote-buying schemes, none at all. Thanks for your cooperation."

... and the UK provides places where they don't do that, not on the top-line profit anyway. Sure. I can see how having that would be attractive to both legitimate and illegitimate operators. Its net impact on corruption, though, would be a little tricky to sort out.

(Postscript. As I'm being moderated down without comment, I assume that those doing so are those privileged enough to be in a nice low-corruption Western economy where we have a slightly better grade of politician than, say, Dilma Rousseff and her legislature. So I wish to note that despite cynicism about world governments I retain due respect for anti-corporate sentiment as well...)

I don't know about Zambia, but in Argentina most people don't care too much about campaign contributions. The perception is that most of the corruption there is through cronyism, and kickbacks from outrageously overpriced goods and services bought by the State. It is not politicians robbing businesses, but politicians and some businesses robbing the tax money of, mainly, the middle class.

The thing about campaign contributions is that it's all about the exchange: in return, the contributors get a say in government policy, enforcement, decisions. It undermines democracy. Is it better, or worse, than naked cronyism and kickbacks in the form of contracts, overpriced goods and services, etc.?

Hard to say. Depressing to think about.

Except that the U.S. is considered to have a well-enough developed system of on-shore tax havens to not require going to Panama.

Please name just one. I pay a lot in taxes.

LLC in Delaware. Literally listed by my country's regulations as a tax haven.

* Persons, actual or legal, with annual income/EBIDTA below $300k and/or net worth below $3MM, will not be deemed eligible for the IRS Section 708(c) conforming tax evasion schemes under the Trickle Down Economies Support Act.

Nevada, Wyoming, and South Dakota

source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/the-world-...

And when you consider Hong Kong is the tiniest in all those places mentioned within the paper........

You got it. If the world crushed The City working people everywhere would benefit. The City is a total cancer. As a Brit I'd love to see it removed, permanently.

Reported that the City's contribution UK's national income is about £45bn or 3%, while London accounts for £334bn or 22% of the UK's. But to what extent is that 22% dependent on the indirect effect of the City? Britain will certainly be poorer and poor people will likely be even poorer. You want to see it removed regardless of consequences?

Tax havens are the only defence against rapacious politicians who, unlike business people, do not suffer the ill effects of their policies. You can always get votes for promising bread and circuses! Do you think that's true or false? The enormous debt burdens we see across the world attest to that.

For those who enjoy looking at both sides: http://www.conservativehome.com//platform/2011/08/in-defence...

The London figure is always trotted out. All accounting is done through London. Also counting money like this doesn't count "wealth". A bunch of people creating new money as credit actually soaks up wealth as the rest of the UK is forced to exchange actual labour and products for fiat money against ever increasing land prices.

Tax havens aren't bastions of freedom. Load of rubbish. They are allowing massive inequalities and letting rogues plunder common wealth.

Did Abmramovich personally add billions in value? Or did he claim he, not the Russian people, "owned" much of Russia's oil and then washed a good part of it through London property?

If a trafficker uses a mule to carry opium across the mountains, then sells the drugs and then sells the mule, is the new owner of the mule responsible for drug trafficking? Abramovich is Russian and the responsibility of the people running Russia. Likewise if the Maffia recycles money into legitimate assets in Italy then trades those assets in London, it's pretty rich for an Italian to try to pin that on London.

The article also talks about British overseas territories as though their laws are written in Westminster. They aren't. All these places make their own tax laws without any reference to the British government. Is this mentioned anywhere in the article? No, instead it's spun as though it's all a Westminster plot. Suppose Westminster did start imposing laws on these territories, would the Independent be applauding this as an example of responsible action or condemning it as an illegal and unconstitutional abrogation of Britain's responsibility to protect the independence of these territories? I think we have a right to know their opinion on that.

Of course Britain has a responsibility to fight crime and work with other governments to crack down on abuses, but we can't singlehandedly be the policemen for the whole world.

"Britain's responsibility to protect the independence of these territories"

Would this mean that the independence of "these territories" is dependent on Britain somehow? Quite an independence, heh? And now, Britain, the ultimate power that backs up the laws of the said territories can at the same claim to be absolved of whatever is happening under its protected domains? Astonishing, isn't it?

> Astonishing, isn't it?

Er, no. Everyone needs their independence to be protected. Just ask Tibetans, or Kuwaitis, or most of Europe. The fact is these offshore havens being nominally under British protection doesn't make one iota of difference to their tax laws or whether or not the businesses registered there do business with Britain. In fact Britain loses tax revenue just as much as anyone else, and has been working hard for decades to get these havens to tighten up their rules. But unfortunately annoying things like facts don't match the narrative this article is trying to spin

The state where nobody is responsible for anything and yet everyone is protected against everything is astonishing! ...at least to me.

> if the Maffia recycles money into legitimate assets in Italy then trades those assets in London, it's pretty rich for an Italian to try to pin that on London

It's not rich to criticise London if London is aware of or suspects that it's the Mafia they are dealing with and that the "legitimate" assets are simply laundered.

I also don't see why it's rich for an Italian to do the criticising. Perhaps you can explain that one.

If a bank has any reason to suspect that funds they are handling involve laundering they have very clear responsibilities to report them, and have strong incentives to do so as the watchdogs have real teeth.

It's rich because the police and banks in the UK can and do co-operate with the Italian authorities on criminal activities occurring in Italy, but at the end of the day the crime happened in Italy. Only someone with an axe to grind and predisposition against London would blame that on London.

So it's simply grinding an axe against London, and not that, according to the UK National Crime Agency, "hundreds of billions of US dollars of criminal money almost certainly continue to be laundered through UK banks, including their subsidiaries, each year”?

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