Secret Files Expose Offshore’s Global Impact

Your linked article draws the comparison between regulating unpasteurized milk and Nazi Germany, which seems not completely even-handed.

[citation needed]

And what does this actually mean? How do you define insolvent governments?

If you are thinking of one-off cuts when the state is actually going bankrupt (latest cyprus thingie, italy's cut in '92 etc) these don't seem to offer a different security from keeping money in a foreign non-offshore bank.

And these events don't seem so common to me.

Or are you considering governments insolvent in the sense that they just waste money and taxing is stealing etc ?

I am unsure how the situation is in these specific cases, but way way way often offshore accounts get found out in my country (italy) related to _massively illegal_ activities.

This is not a case of avoiding messing up a tax form, it's accounts used to pay bribes for falsified trial witnesses with money laundered from drug smuggling.

I lived in the BVI in the mid 90s and most of the companies registered there at that time were Taiwanese companies investing in mainland China. A stupid law wouldn't allow them to invest directly. Thanks to BVI the Taiwanese tech industry were able to start the Chinese tech manufacturing boom.

Much of the world in the past 100 years has had bank runs, currency devaluations, genocides and all sorts of other idiocy primarily caused by bad governments. Offshore banks and companies provide ways for people in those countries to maintain some level of security.

Yes in between those million offshore accounts there may be the accounts of a Papa Doc or an Idi Amin. But witch hunting people using offshore only does more damage to people who are already victims of those said bad governments.

The drug connection is also over hyped. Real money launders only use banks for connections between their "legal" businesses. The money laundering doesn't happen in the banks but in the fake "legal" businesses they set up.

For the past 100 or so years the offshore industry, be it in Switzerland, Miami, London or Cayman Islands have been important parts of making the world financial systems less fragile.

I could definitely see how citizens of other countries could legitimately use such accounts to get around immoral laws in their home countries. Whether this makes up "most people" who use offshore accounts, as you claim, is beyond my knowledge.

I would bet that a great percentage of the volume of money moving through these offshore havens are indeed a hedge against insolvent governments: the governors' own. There's a reason these island nations are where despots like Gaddafi, Mugabe, Marcos, Bashir, Afwerki, Mbasogo, Mubarak, Kagame, and others, and their extended families, park their money.

In the Western world, most people use off shores to avoid paying taxes that regular citizens pay and that they, themselves would have to pay if not for hiding their money through various channels.

We might not like high taxation, in Europe, but we do believe in fair taxes and in our state having money for education, health, military, etc. And we consider those people using tax havens and offshoring to be the scum of the earth, at least in popular, average person, opinion. See the popular reaction to Gerard Depardieu seeking tax shelter outside France for an example.

POPCNT has recently landed as part of SSE4.2 in Intel processors.

"The major software tools used for the Offshore Project were NUIX of Sydney, Australia, and dtSearch of Bethesda, Md. NUIX Pty Ltd provided ICIJ with a limited number of licenses to use its fully featured high-end e-discovery software, free of charge. The listed cost for the NUIX software was higher than a non-profit organization like the ICIJ could afford, if the software had not been donated."

Securiing their communications proved more difficult than free-text search, however:

"The project team’s attempts to use encrypted e-mail systems such as PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”) were abandoned because of complexity and unreliability that slowed down information sharing."

edit: in response to the downvotes, I'm not saying journalists are dumb, but that the data/technical problems they face are myriad and they often don't get the grounding they need to tackle them, so they, in my opinion, are too quick to pay for commercial software that only solves part of the problem they need to fix. Not just "opinion" here, but actual experience with colleagues and consulting on projects with outside groups. That said, the software they allude to sounds like a system that can mass-process scanned documents, OCR them, and I would assume, use NLP to reduce the amount of work needed to hand clean. But I'm betting that there was still an incredible amount of hand-cleaning that had to be done.

A related article at The Guardian provides more details. Specifically: "The ICIJ's exploration of offshore secrets began when a computer hard drive packed with corporate data arrived in the post. Gerard Ryle, ICIJ's director, obtained the small black box as a result of his three-year investigation of Australia's Firepower scandal, a case involving offshore havens and corporate fraud."

As for the Firepower Scandal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firepower_International

"Firepower International was advertised as a Hong Kong-based company owned and operated by Global Fuel Technologies Ltd, specializing in technology purporting to reduce the fuel consumption and environmental impact of petrol-operated vehicles.[1] There were other offices in Sydney, China, Rhodes, Athens and Papua New Guinea, according to the now-defunct official company website. But "in reality it was a handful of people in an industrial estate in Perth", who were conducting a complex of fraudulent operations.[2] The original entity—Firepower Operations Pty Ltd—was a $1 company, first registered in December 2004, owned by Firepower Holdings Group Ltd, a company with an address in the British Virgin Islands.[3]"

Oh what a wicked web we weave ...

(not condoning this behavior in any way)

Perhaps I'm concerned about the quality of my country's management. If for that or any other reason, I decide to put some money into foreign currency and place it with another country's banking system, while continuing to comply with my own country's tax laws, what right do you have to steal the information and publish it on the internet?

One way to look at it is: how would you like it if it was discovered that a drug lord was using the same bank as you to launder money, and therefore your bank account balances and recent transfers were released to the public, even though you had nothing to do with the drug lord other than storing your money at the same bank?