Dubai real estate data leak – Exposes criminals, officials, and politicians

That highlights another point really well, the low-level financial worker's perception of "source of fund laws" (AML/KYC) is laughable, the reasoning they tell the investor/customer is laughably incorrect, just an ambiguous quip about "security purposes" or "making sure you aren't a drug dealer/terrorist/laundering money"

when thats all incorrect. from the investor/customer and low-level banker's perspective, it is impossible to distinguish between the actual law, their private company's interpretation of that law, strictly separate company policy, their implementation of that combination of things, the flaws or merits of that implementation, the flaws and merits of the law.

In this case, the person asking you actually doesn't care at all. Your role is to simple not say the bad word. A word you don't know. So you can always say pretty much anything, as long as its not "I'm on the OFAC list and I'm circumventing sanctions moving money from my heroin business".

A US citizen, for example, would never have any restriction banking in the US due to prior conduct (unless you pissed off that sector due to a history of overdrafts, bounced checks, see chexsystems). Al Capone would always be able to open a bank account or brokerage account or buy property. The Patriot Act would have never flagged the Saudi terrorist wire transfers despite being passed under the guise of flagging that kind of thing. AML/KYC is just a data mining operation masqueraded as preventing ... something. Something thats not terribly expensive, especially when compared to the amount of money that isn't flagged. Turns out people just don't want to blow up planes and buildings. The only people convicted of violating capital controls are the poorest of the proletariat that has some ambiguous and wrong understanding about "moving $10,000", and gets thrown in prison for attempting to circumvent it simply because the law against circumventing the threshold is on the books, whether the threshold would have applied to how the money was moved or not!

The entire thing is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer and public sector resources, and private sector compliance costs are probably overhanging a full digit % of the GDP growth.

Its successfully stigmatized the concept of having money, from the very population that needs and strives to have it the most! While everyone that can afford education or legal help or a dynasty of passed on knowledge is operating with complete freedom.

They're not stupid.

(Speculation alert)

It seems to me they serve a higher level purpose of squeezing the middle class and the "small rich" (sorry, lack a better expression) out of their wealth.

All this BS anti-ML, KYC, etc do is make this audience's lives harder and more expensive to invest and diversify their risks.

Meanwhile, the "big rich" (again, sorry) can navigate these ridiculous bureaucracies easily, as the fixed costs are comparatively small to them.

Criminals also can navigate this easy as a piece of cake.

Or do they imagine that a person who committed dark crimes will stop and think: "Oh nooo, I have to send my real passport photo? Damn, busted!"

I don't understand why we need to specifically sanction tax havens. Unless rich people are making money in the tax havens themselves (in which case they're not just tax havens), we can just levy all the taxes we want before the money leaves our own borders.

> Places that allow the rich to prevent themselves from being taxed by their home countries do not deserve existence.

Sounds like you are describing almost every single country on earth!

I think what you really object to is countries offering attractive tax regimes.

Here is what I read:

"Its absurd we are not being hosed equally"

instead of

"Why are we being hosed at all"

Countries finance themselves from the international debt markets, and pay the interest with their taxes and with future debt issuances. They pay prior investors with future investor money, and convince future investors by periodically paying the interest and they idea that the country could pay more interest any time it wants (by raising taxes, or straight expropriation of property). All this means that the things that were going to get funded and built and supported were already chosen to do so and greater tax collection would have no bearing on that. (Some smaller taxes directly fund certain institutions, but its not like a road or school or social service in a poor area would ever actually get prioritized.)

> Places that allow the rich to prevent themselves from being taxed by their home countries do not deserve existence.

You are falsely assuming that every country's tax policy is reasonable or fair. Look at the United States policy on foreign assets which effectively amounts to double taxation for no other reason than "we don't like rich people" / "we don't like our citizens not living here".

> We need to get this money back under our control - if only to prevent social unrest from the 2/3rd of the US which have less than 1000$ in liquid savings.

It's not your money to begin with, it belongs to the people who rightfully earned it, not the government, nor the poor. Peoples' assets don't exist to serve as piggy banks for social programs and redistribution.

> that allow the rich to prevent themselves from being taxed by their home countries

That is a big list of entire countries if you include legal persons in the definition

Whitelisting transactions is a fools errand and not a policy solution.

If that leaves everyone with a void and absence of any policy solution, that's where we are.

You can still be a libertarian, you just have to give up on property rights.

I don't know if I laugh or cry at the naivety of libertarians talking about common people funding defense contractors to protect them from organized crime and foreign state-owned armies.

It is a great pity that so many of those havens are shielded by western countries too. The UK has the crown dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey, various Caribbean holdings), the US has various vassal states (as I understand it), France is the same, then there are the microstates like Monaco. None of it could exist without the tacit consent of large countries that have legal or diplomatic sway over these jurisdictions.

The corruption Lord Nawaz Sharif is there in London, UK

Yeah but what’s the point? I don’t think that’s even a good investment, and I don’t think it’s nice destination for holidays too lol.

It’s nice for a week or two, but gets boring pretty fast. You can only eat at L’Atelier so many times.

But it’s surely better than almost every other city in the world.

Corrupt amoral regime, filled with corrupt amoral people. Bliss for many here, hell for people who value humanity

Been there for work a couple of days.

I haven't ever been in a place that felt so fake and liveless. The only thing you can do is go to the mall.

It's dystopian in every aspect.

I went here 4 years ago. Hypocritical society, everything seemed fake and useless, made just to impress. Someone was writing below about infrastructure and all that. It’s what I would imagine the US, everything being made for cars, a huge n-lane highway through the city, impossible to walk anywhere, except maybe the fake marina and the fake neighborhoods. The only genuine place there was the old town, but I might suspect that was also fake.

Public transport is for naive Europeans and the slaves, oh, sorry, the Asian people exploited to serve and run their society. The whole city is full of people impressed by the so called wealth and futurism, tasteless shops, malls and skyscrapers.

When I left I said to myself I will never come back to such a hypocritical and shallow place made for wannabe Instagram millionaires and low level mobsters.

Heat

It's hot, so people aren't really out. There's no sidewalks, so you just take a cab to go everywhere or go from buildings to buildings using bridges. It's all about living a luxurious life. If you've been to Vegas, it's like living in these hotels 24/7, or at least that's how I imagined living there after my trip there.

Oh and of course the culture and the politics there... you really have to look the other way.

To add to the other replies, this video highlights the bad aspects of the city: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tJuqe6sre2I

Positive consequences.

The entire concept of using public resources and burdonsome private sector regulations to whitelist transactions has always been shaky logic. The theatre has simply bought time on - or against - considering attempting other forms of compliance (war). But its always been bullshit and its always been an option to not play along with that, and do your own thing. UAE is doing their own thing.

Its business as usual, lots of financial conferences, crypto parties, meeting and trade spot for people of all nationalities. Thats kind of one of my favorite things about travel, going somewhere where its not taboo to run into someone from a third country.

I know a lot of people that have hung out in dubai over the last 2 months promoting whatever product or service, as if nothing else was going on in the world. Russian, America, EU citizen, Swiss, Ukrainian, Ukranian-American, Russian-America, people from other countries less involved in this conflict. Just business as usual. The weather is also pretty nice.

Sometimes its useful to just shift your mental nexus. There is a version of the world where Dubai is (or remains) its own bubble while the rest of the world is shambling along with their unrelated conflicts. Like a future bubble city like in an Aldous Huxley novel or the Jetsons.

"tax bureaucrats" are what took down Al Capone. These days Al would have much better lawyers and layers of shell corporations in various tax havens. He would be untouchable merely because the effort to sleuth out the truth has become much harder. Laws and regulations subdue any advantages transparency tech could bring.

What did it expose specifically about him?

Great that there was an impact, but still its not big enough.