The patterns of elites who conceal their assets offshore
home.dartmouth.edu
home.dartmouth.edu
More info here: https://www.icij.org/
As an aside, I would also ask this question: why not democratize this and make billions using the same loopholes so that everyone gains access or they are forced to fix it? Surely it’s a good startup opportunity.
Isn't the icij "just" a network of people already doing investigative journalism who work on this stuff anyway? As in it's just a place where investigative journalists can meet/discuss investigations that cross borders? My impression were that they were just normal journalists and that groups then formed and disbanded based on interest within this network.
I certainly love their work, and I think a network like that is very important (we should probably have something similar for software developers/IT people across Europe), calling them a group seems wrong with my understanding though.
what do you mean by that? support by doing data journalism? more like hacktivism?
I'm thinking something akin to FRONTEX JAD's or that conference the EU has where lawyers show up to discuss cases they need EU assistance with.
Concretely, my company recently did a migration into Azure, if we were at a meeting like that and somebody said they were planning to do the same, we would have a bunch of experience to share with them.
I imagine that could maybe help foster some shared European understanding about what our big tech problems are. Maybe we could even let the solutions end up as open source or something.
So, at least subscribe to one of the papers !
(I know, sorry HN, I asked people to pay for a service that could be financed by ads to gather more data - aka more food for the algo. Sorry.)
Actually, I'd say there's three such networks: ICIJ, GIJN and OCCRP. They're not really competitors, each serving slightly different purposes, and there's plenty of collaboration and overlap between their members.
Source: I'm not in that world anymore, but I knew about Panama Papers long before it was public and have my name in the credits in some of the collaborations with ICIJ.
Update: Maybe it was the program Rambam where the makers set up their own tax haven based on the methods of the big corporations. Information in Dutch:
https://pers.bnnvara.nl/rambam-ontduikt-belasting-met-medewe...
https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.j...
Anyone who has a significant amount of money can avoid these taxes, as always.
Consistently the best thing on TV.-
You may be required to have a local agent, and they will add their address and names as the nominee shareholders so you remain anonymous. Then with an LLC, the company can open bank accounts and you can move money. Any money made offshore is non-taxed locally.
No different to Delaware.
The latter is used by corrupt politicians, oligarchs (extremely wealthy people who have massive influence on policy/politics), and to stifle investigations by civil investigations (divorce), to stifle criminal investigations (political corruption, sanctions avoidance, fences for thieves, a convenient vehicle for transactions or large assets so governments/ oversight can’t easily track them).
There is a minimum overhead required (you need at least a part time CPA and attorney to give you the strategy, more if they actually implement it), but I don’t think it requires you be ultra wealthy. The problem is that most law-abiding, non-sociopath people don’t benefit much from avoiding the law.
I don't think there are many VCs willing to invest into this.
Edit: after reading the article, I realize most of the “loopholes” to be changes are in disparate countries, not the _source_ country. This makes the whole idea less attractive. I suppose you could potentially still get rid of the anonymous-representative option by which people conceal their connection to different assets.
The Town That Took On The Tax Man https://youtu.be/ipV_GU7YaQg
It’s about a Welsh town that set out to do just this. Recommended watch.
The median household net worth is ~200k.
In prior years, I didn't have nagging anxieties about people's life savings being arbitrarily frozen/seized as a form of political retribution, or the imposition of China-style capital controls to ensure "patriotic investing."
Before anybody decries that as (still) far-fetched, consider that the federal government forced banks to drain millions from the accounts of states (NY), announced $365,000/yr "fines" on undocumented immigrants, and imposed arbitrary (illegal) import taxes while threatening companies against showing it on the bill.
"This suggests a counterintuitive result: use of offshore finance is driven not only by negative political conditions such as corruption and lack of civil justice, but by positive conditions, such as regulatory enforcement and civil justice."
Given so many of the comments here about tracking the offshore accounts down and confiscating the contents, it's no surprise.
Irrespective of whether their practices are immoral, unethical, unfair, or unjust, they're definitely not counterintuitive.
It's genuinely hard for me to understand how the authors could believe otherwise.
So... Taxes?
I'm intrigued as to the framing of your post. You seem to be positing that it's entirely expected and understandable that wealthy individuals in well functioning systems should commit fraud to the detriment of the system that brought them their wealth. That seems counterintuitive to me, at least.
If we're talking about wealth not income, then no, not really. We don't usually think of asset seizure as "taxes". In other words, one "taxes" flows (like capital gains and wages) and "siezes" stocks (like bank deposits and equity).
"You seem to be positing that it's entirely expected and understandable"
I wasn't making value judgement, but yes, if you look at it with the assumption these wealthy individuals are cold, calculating, self-interested actors, then it's "expected and understandable" to me.
"That seems counterintuitive to me, at least."
I think you're using "intuitive" as a shorthand for "the way things ought to work in a righteous world", where I find incentives and disincentives to be a more intuitive way of understanding the world.
"wealthy individuals in well functioning systems should commit fraud to the detriment of the system that brought them their wealth"
To be fair, it's not necessarily fraudulent to have offshore accounts or to conceal your identity (it can certainly be depending on the circumstances). Technically I have an "offshore" account, I just happen to be living outside the US and a US citizen. I also use mechanisms to conceal my identity when registering domain names, for example. Is it the same thing, no, but these people might not technically be doing anything illegal.
It isn't necessarily true that those systems "brought them their wealth" either. Plenty of them likely inherited wealth that was accumulated long before the current systems were put in place (granted, it could very well have been accumulated illegitimately 300 years ago).
(Again, I'm not saying any of this is how the world should work, I'm trying to look at the world dispassionately and describe how things seem to be)
At the level of wealth we're discussing, these individuals probably have to think about "diversifying" among nation-states. Instead of worrying about whether to short the tech sector, they're worried about a country being invaded and the new puppet regime deciding to nationalize the hydroelectric dam they financed. Or they may be worrying about whether their country of residence will pass a law that the biggest national telcom must sell the government a majority stake (i.e., their share) at a government-mandated price denominated in an inflating currency... with expert bureaucratic efficiency.
So... no, not really taxes.
Lawsuits, divorces, taxes on unrealized income, taxes contested by another state, offshore earning complications, ...
The trauma of giant unexpected bills or losses can make people do ... things.
There are a number of reasons why we might use offshore companies and apparent tax havens - while the taxes are an added sweetener, the main reason is that there is often concrete rule of law in these jurisdictions.
Did you know that for Russians and Chinese, the US is a tax haven? As long as you're not a US resident, you only pay US taxes (which can be easily optimized to be far below Russian or Chinese taxes). You enjoy a high degree of anonymity. You also get to gamble in the biggest equity markets of the world, which are backed by a strong financial system eager to lend you gambling money based on your assets.
Compare that to Russia, India or China, where your assets can be seized at a moment's notice, on the whims of some pencil pusher bureaucrat or judge.
But for offshoring, I'm clueless as to how manage to "reshore" the money, so to speak, so that you can eventually... Spend it to buy stuff. (Or isn't that the purpose of hiding the money ?)
I talked to someone recently who claimed to know someone personally with 16,000 metric tons of gold. He claims that there is waaay more gold than is officially on the books. Hard to believe… but maybe not. He claims that there is unbelievable wealth out there—many more hundred-billionaires than official stats hold. Ok. Who knows?
There are approximately 200,000 tons of gold ever mined in total.
I understand where all these conspiracies come from. It typically starts with "there must be enough gold to back all the savings, because Bretton-Woods or something". Then they check the total cost of the world's gold. It's a small fraction of the total savings.
So obviously most of the gold is hidden somewhere.
https://chatgpt.com/share/687a0a4c-6bd4-8007-bec8-2683ef49df...
But after some research, I’m convinced. We mine a lot more gold today than in the ancient past. Not much more gold left to mine, though — at current rates, we are done in 20 some years! I find that also hard to believe, but so it goes.
We're not going to stop mining gold in 20 years. That's probably an estimate derived by dividing known reserves by current production rates. But that number is just an artifact of how "reserves" are defined. See this publication from the United States Geological Survey:
"Mineral Reserves, Resources, Resource Potential, And Certainty"
https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/7000088/sta13.pdf
Reserve: That portion of an identified resource from which a usable mineral or energy commodity can be economically and legally extracted at the time of determination.
Miners continually quantify geological features to turn them into known "reserves." Some identified ore bodies also get converted into reserves by rising commodity prices or improved extraction techniques. No new ore bodies have formed in the past 60 years, but new reserves have continually been identified.
This misunderstanding is why people keep (wrongly) predicting that the world will run out of e.g. indium; even people who are otherwise educated make this mistake:
"Augsberg University Calculate When Our Materials Run Out - Soon" (June 4, 2007)
https://www.printedelectronicsworld.com/articles/591/augsber...
Armin Reller, a materials chemist at the University of Augsburg in Germany, and his colleagues are among the few groups who have been investigating the problem. He estimates that we have, at best, 10 years before we run out of indium.
It clearly did not run out by 2017:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Indium_world_product...
If the guy living under the bridge has 1 million metric tons of tons of gold they don't spend, it is functionally equivalent to if they had none.
If you claim there are hundreds of stealth billionaires with $1-$20b in cash & assets, I'll readily believe that: African kleptocrats' kids, Middle East royalty, European heirs with a low profile, Russian oligarchs, etc. But, not $100b. Or a trillion. That's an insane amount of money, larger than the GDP of like 80% of the world's countries.
There isn't. People with deep knowledge of this don't invest their time writing blogs. Bit like OpenAI employees don't write blogs about how to train world class models. It's just not a thing.
There is an abundance of shrill articles by journalists writing about it that derive their knowledge from other articles written by journalists who in turn...
The big tech stuff flowing through Ireland is indeed lets call it convenient for both ireland and big tech, but what people don't realise is that chances are very high that their own pension likely flows through offshore structuring too. These places act as a central neutral clearing house of sorts that is acceptable to a lot of jurisdictions so even actors not after tax evasion use them.
On the same vein, I perfectly expect off shoring practices to be kinda "secret and sensitive information", as they are basically "exploits" of tax code - but that does not mean that all cybersecurity books are "shill".
The people who implements offshoring have to learn from somewhere, so there is written tracks. It might even be taught in accounting schools, assuming that some part of it is in a gray area, "legally."
This is the kind of very high level info I'm interested in.
Chances of it being helpful to you is quite low. It's expensive and mostly works in corporate context.
>The people who implements offshoring have to learn from somewhere, so there is written tracks.
All on the job. Hop on a plane to caymans or whatever, spend half a decade working at a service provider there and then you'll have seen various implementations.
Keep in mind that this stuff changes all the time as the various countries' laws shift and each structure is essentially a once off custom design.
>It might even be taught in accounting schools
It's not.
Why would you reshore the bulk of funds? We're talking about people for whom a couple of million is just spare money.
If you want to buy a company, you just use the offshore funds directly. If you want to buy a major luxury good (a yacht or a jet), you do the same and then just lease/rent it to yourself.
If you _absolutely_ need cash in the US, you can pay yourself dividends and take a hit paying taxes on this amount only.
(Or maybe they're the discrete kind, and they won't tell anyone. And we're back to "whether USA plans to invade Switzerland in the coming months ?", I guess)
But there is a central driving force behind it all: governments constantly fight for "tax justice" with one hand and create various "incentives" and exceptions with the other, in an effort to briefly gain the upper hand over other countries in the zero-sum game of attracting international capital. The former tends to plug all possible loopholes for the "ordinary wealthy", while the latter always leaves options for the truly big fish, they just don't stay the same decade-over-decade.
If I buy a bunch of baseball cards at 1c each and later it turns out that the market values them at $100 each, I never actually "took" money from anyone. Yes it's patently unfair that I got that lucky, but it wasn't necessarily at anyone's expense.
Now, when I actually go to sell those cards then I do actually "take" money from someone else, but while those gains are unrealized it's just paper wealth.
In such a case it's also not clear who I am "taking" from. The person buying them off of me gave me the money, but you could also say the baseball card company was exploited and lost out on pricing their cards at $100?
In other words, you owe taxes on the capital gains because someone is working to make those gains for you.
They're linked but it's not 1:1. The whole point of a corporation and a value-add economy is to do a force multiplier on the cost of labor. It doesn't matter how hard you work when digging with a shovel, a lazy guy with an excavator will create value faster than you can.
The guy providing the excavator is currently keeping the lion's share of the productivity gains, and that's not good. But it's also not quite the same as saying all of the wealth comes from exploitation.
So in my world view, yes, all wealth is exploitative. No one person can do enough work to earn millions and billions more than others.
The baseball card company is in the business of selling lottery tickets. If there wasn't a secondary market for the ones that get really valuable, they'd sell a lot fewer new cards to people looking for a winning lottery ticket.
It's a weird business for them because they're selling lottery tickets, but don't necessarily know which ones will be winners. Although with all the statistics and moneyball stuff, they'd sell a probably have a better idea now than in the past.
I think it's more like gambling on horse races. They make money by making the opportunity, and it's mostly the participants who prey upon one another.
No wealth was created by "discovering value" or finding someone with money to buy something that was already there before. If this new person decided to spend $100 on a baseball card, then they didn't spend money on something else, so the market for those other things is naturally going to price them lower. So the $100 came from somewhere[1].
All of these open system chains of thought that assume any "non-zero sum game" either improperly account for devaluation of other goods or they assume accumulation of labor, and typically add a side helping of assumed exponential growth.
[1] Which is not say that money cannot be created from nothing. In fact, it is all the time. Debt--loans, stocks, bonds, IOUs--is money creation.
it's not unfair since you took the risk of potentially losing your original investment; you also put in the time to learn about baseball cards, while other people were interested in antiques and studied and bought those, also with a risk that what they bought would decrease in value.
Can I interest you in some Beanie Babies?
I suggest that you could count on one hand the number of people in the entire history of humanity who could and would hide this kind of wealth who didn't earn it through somehow relying on others and/or society's structure.
says who?
No argument that printing money devalues everyone else (this is the definition of inflation). End the Fed.
Doesn't this assume perfect information?
Edit: concrete example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(automobile)
Edit2: metaphorical example. I have a very valuable bridge to sell you. Just hope the value you receive isn't different than the value you perceive at transaction time. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/I_have_a_bridge_to_sell_you
Lots of transactions actually destroy value, they just do so in a way that externalizes this cost.
A good example is advertising: companies are incentivized to dump all available resources into marketing, because those who don't get out-competed by those who do. It is a winner-takes-all game where the strategy that maximizes global value is nowhere close to being a Nash equilibrium.
A more extreme example would be hiring someone to go rob a bank. No value is created (lots is destroyed) but both parties to the transaction come out ahead.
No.
None of this stuff is permanent.
And as allies of the USA, the navy ain't coming.
So USD flows into Cayman banks, and those banks need to do something with the massive amounts of money just sitting there. So what do they do? They buy U.S. Treasuries. And half a trillion dollars is just their holdings in U.S. debt, imagine how much more money is hidden in those accounts and invested in other assets.
1. https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...
Asset security is exactly one of the reasons people seek foreign shelters. If you've got a ton of value to control, you want it to be secure, and sometimes your own government is the primary threat.
— Leona Helmsley
What a horrible human being.
The current EU blacklist includes 11 jurisdictions: American Samoa, Anguilla, Fiji, Guam, Palau, Panama, the Russian Federation, Samoa, Trinidad & Tobago, US Virgin Islands, and Vanuatu. (Source: EU List of Non-Cooperative Nations for Tax Purposes - European Commission)
If anyone has a better definition or has read the underlying book, please let me know, but I found the research hard to follow without this being well defined as the OECD apparently no longer maintains a blacklist.
Also, I wondered why more famous countries are not on the list and it says that these large commissions often identify small weak islands, because large players like the US, Britain, Switzerland, Luxembourg, China have enough political power to not be placed on the list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia
Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia (née Vella; 26 August 1964 – 16 October 2017) was a Maltese writer, journalist, blogger and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta. She was known internationally for her investigation of the Panama Papers and subsequent assassination by a car bomb. Caruana Galizia focused on investigative journalism, reporting on government corruption, nepotism, patronage, and allegations of money laundering, links between Malta's online gambling industry and organized crime, Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme, and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. Caruana Galizia's national and international reputation was built on her regular reporting of misconduct by Maltese politicians and politically exposed persons.
No one is going to get killed for this one!
The comments here are not representative of broader society, but they can sometimes be interesting to gain a sense of where an influential chunk of the global tech elite is at. I have heard HN political or social talking points echoed in the mouths of leadership at company all-hands, and non-HN reading friends at other tech companies have mentioned similar themes at theirs, so there is some value in having this window into the culture as an early warning system.
Using your assets/wealth as political power seems to have become more popular here in northern Europe. Taxes too high? Fuck you, I'll take my money and companies to Switzerland. If politicians buckle, they'll move back home. Seems like a race to the bottom, where the tax havens will just compete for the best terms to the ultra wealthy.
For example, Britain’s famous “non-domiciled” tax exception was first created in 1799. It allows UK-resident foreigners not to pay tax on their foreign income except for funds they bring into the UK.
Wealthy families have been able to live their lives enjoying the stability of a Western democracy without paying taxes, keeping their assets scattered safely around the world and their citizenships wherever they can get the best deal.
The USA is also joining this game with Trump’s “gold card” that offers a path to citizenship for a $5M fee. But I don’t think the very rich will bite because US law and the IRS expect citizens to report their global income (at least for now, maybe Trump will eliminate this too with a stroke of a pen).
You forgot one variable. Women have a mind of their own.
Switzerland tried to take London's Hedge Fund Industry. The wives and kids hated the lack of things to do compared to London.
Same with Footballers. If a football player or manager signs for a club in a unattractive location, the wives may stay in the previous City.
They'll provide them with financial support and that's where their relationship often ends.
Their loyalty is mainly to their wealth and status, everything else around them is "stuff" that merely exist to fulfill the goal of increasing profit.
I'm sure there are exceptions but I'm making a simple observations.
https://x.com/declassifiedUK/status/1945077503996895319
If you are an activist, have stuff offshore in a country other than the one you campaign in. And Crypto.
What is 'civic participation' in this context ?
"Singapore has consistently been rated as the least-corrupt country in Asia and amongst the top ten cleanest in the world by Transparency International. The World Bank's governance indicators have also rated Singapore highly on rule of law, control of corruption and government effectiveness. However, it is widely perceived that some aspects of the political process, civil liberties, and political, labour and human rights are lacking. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Singapore a "flawed democracy" in 2024. Freedom House deemed Singapore "partly free" in 2025, at 48/100 — 19/40 for political rights, 29/60 for civil liberties."
I wonder what sort of political event would change that, probably when EU countries realize they need money to rebuild their military.
_Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite_ by Jake Bernstein
Not to be a defender of criminal money laundering, but this is an important caveat. When all money is traceable, digital and controlled, good luck funding anything against the government in an authoritarian setting.
Unfortunately that's a catch-22
I'm well aware of the impact of corruption and organized crime and how it affects billions worldwide, I've read more than one book on the subject. but it's analogous to the issue with cryptography, privacy and protecting people, especially minors, on the internet for example
it's a small point but, "elites" usually refers to those with good educational credentials who hold down white collar jobs at universities, newsmedia, law and finance firms, political campaigns, non-profits, etc., jobs they got because their parents know how to help them network and who can afford to pay their rent in major cities while they "pay their dues" as interns in these same organizations. Yes, they do have higher than average incomes, but I heard a great word for them (from a left-leaning source fwiw) who called them "the 19%". They are not the 1%, but they make up the rest of the 20% and they work for the 1%, and though they often have left leaning political ideals, it's human nature to want to defend what you have and feel you earned it, and also to pass it along and take care of your own children's futures. According to this guy, they control 2x the wealth that the 1% controls and flex a lot of political muscle.
Billionaires, oligarchs, and other members of the uber rich are generally referred to as just those things. The people behind this study I would guess are in the 19%, and by labelling the billionaires and oligarchs as elites, unconsciously they shed the shame of being elites themselves (Dartmouth? pure ivy league).
Money isn't real: it's an abstraction. What it's an abstraction for, on the other hand, is very real. Don't confuse the map and the territory.
Musk, for example, invested hundreds of millions into Tesla, his entire fortune. Soon afterwards, he was within hours of personal and business bankruptcy.
SpaceX also was one explosion away from total bankruptcy.
Say what you will about Musk, the man has a lot of guts. Without those guts, there'd be no Tesla and no SpaceX and no Starlink.
Scams, cons, grifts, and destructive exploitation of common resources, on the other hand? Those can get massive numbers of monies out for every single number of money in. So that's where my mind goes, when someone talks about "make 12% on [a pile of cash]".
You could. Would you, though?
History (milennia of it) says the average answer is "no".
I don’t see maintaining a church and staff as the same as maintaining a charitable clinic and its staff. As such, I don’t count a tithed dollar as necessarily equivalent as a dollar given to a high quality secular charity.
If you're giving 11% to genuinely charitable causes, good for you! But you're very, very much an outlier.
I'm of the opinion that we should have a constitutional amendment which limits debt to gdp to 80%. If the CBO indicates we will breach that, congress has 8 years to get it back under control before the CBO has the authority to ban officials from public office if it's determined they voted in favor of the legislation responsible for the breach. No doubt there are problems around that. Someone smarter than me can fill in the holes.
The correct approach is to require all those people worried about the “Debt” to hand over any liquid savings they have in bank accounts or retirement funds. Since that is what is causing it by accounting identity.
After all if they consider it to be such a problem they should put their money where their mouth is.
Read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton to understand how the system actually works.
Amusingly a larger deficit means government has more space to spend, not less. People saving means they are not spending which means resources are left underemployed.
Debt to GDP is not a relevant concern in a free floating currency has Japan has demonstrated for decades.
Fixed that for ya!
The government used to sell two bond types - dollar bonds that paid off in dollars, and gold bonds that paid off in gold. The gold bonds were safer and hence paid a lower interest rate.
Enter FDR. FDR decided to pay off the gold bond holders in dollars, not gold, and since the value of gold vs dollars had diverged substantially, FDR confiscated the difference.
That was the end of the phrase "sound as a dollar". Gee, I wonder why nobody says that anymore!
The largest risk of TBills is that inflation will shrink their value, and with catastrophic deficits that is a very, very real risk. That's why I don't invest in bonds or any investment that is denoted in dollars.
Most investments seem to eventually (?) denominate into USD equivalents, especially if you live in the US. Do you mean hard(er) assets like real estate or commodities (which also leaves me puzzled because they’re still typically denoted in an underlying fiat currency and especially USD if they’re domestic assets).
It’s easy to imagine a well performing stock that neverless loses due to a currency shock. Indeed this is why one would typically hedge currency risk if trading a name outside of accounting currency