Free Republic

Accessible only by car via miles of winding, dusty Croatian roads, Gornja Siga – current population zero – is an unlikely testing ground for a plan to shape the world’s political future. It is a secluded area where verdant forest meets white sand on a western bank of the river Danube. The only signs of life are a single dilapidated building with a curious flag flying outside, pheasants, deer, the occasional wild boar, and eagles and falcons overhead. Yet last Monday the Eurosceptic Czech politician Vit Jedlicka and two other libertarians declared this 7 sq km of Serbo-Croat no-man’s-land the...

It sounded like a historical moment was in the offing. For the first time, Europe’s finance ministers were seriously planning on publicly denouncing tax havens by presenting a black list of countries that lure companies through tax-saving schemes. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said the countries on the list were “not doing enough to fight tax evasion.” Fellow Frenchman Pierre Moscovici, the European Union’s commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, called for vigorous sanctions. […] That was one and a half years ago, and that momentum has largely disappeared. This is partly because the black list had several fundamental...

Germany’s Welt Am Sonntag newspaper has accused British finance minister Phillip Hammond of threatening to drastically slash corporation tax to turn the UK into an offshore tax haven if it is not given a trade deal. In an interview with Hammond, headlined “British finance minister threatens EU partners”, the paper quotes Hammond saying that Britain could be forced to change its economic model if negotiations went badly. “The British people are not going to lie down and say, ‘too bad’,” he said, when asked if the UK could slash corporation taxes. “If we have no access to the European market,...

The European Commission has taken a step towards establishing a common EU list of tax havens, but critics fear that EU capitals may hijack the show and delete allied nations from the record. The EU executive on Thursday (15 September) presented a method for verifying which countries outside the bloc qualify as tax havens (the commission says tax evasion problems inside the EU are dealt with under other, binding legislation). […] The US state of Delaware is a well-known “onshore” tax paradise. The EU, however, is basing its analysis of the US as a whole, meaning it could avoid being...

It isn’t just tropical nations like Panama that act as safe havens for tax avoiders; the US stands accused of the same thing according to a new study by the European Parliament’s Green faction. EurActiv Germany reports.The release of the Panama Papers has been like opening Pandora’s Box: more and more countries around the world are seemingly ready to follow global rules on data exchange in order to curb tax fraud. But it’s not just the well-known tax havens like the Seychelles, the Virgin Islands, Panama and Liechtenstein that are being asked to up their efforts against tax loopholes, according...

Bernie Sanders loves to denounce the tax dodges of the wealthy (even as he pays 13.4% income tax on a $200K+ income), so it would be interesting to hear what he has to say about John Kerry, the current secretary of state and former Democratic Party nominee for president.  An analysis of public documents by the Daily Caller News Foundation indicates that Kerry and his wife liberally use offshore tax havens.  Richard Pollock writes: … a DCNF investigation has confirmed that the former Massachusetts Democratic senator and his billionaire wife, using an elaborate set of Heinz family trusts, have...

In his speech yesterday, following the Treasury's crack down on corporate tax inversions, Obama blamed "poorly designed" laws for allowing illicit money transfers worldwide. Since the speech came at a time when the entire world is still abuzz with the disclosure from the Panama Papers, Obama touched on that as well: "Tax avoidance is a big, global problem" he said on Tuesday, "a lot of it is legal, but that’s exactly the problem" because a lot of it is also illegal. There is one major problem with that: of all the countries in the world, it is none other than...

US Now Ranks Third For Financial Secrecy And Tax Havens After Switzerland And Hong Kong By Michelle Mark @michelleamark m.mark@ibtimes.com on November 02 2015 4:33 PM EST The U.S. has overtaken Singapore and the Cayman Islands in its ranking for financial secrecy, a new report by the Tax Justice Network in London has found. The government’s refusal to participate in a global information exchange system for bank data was largely responsible for its jump to third place – just behind Switzerland and Hong Kong – in the network’s financial secrecy index, which is released every two years. The Organization for...

George Clooney headlined a fund-raiser Monday that took in more than a half-million dollars for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. Organizers said they took in at least $625,000 from U.S. donors for Obama’s campaign, including many who flew in to Geneva, Switzerland, from around the world for the one-night event.

The world’s newest microcountry wants to become its foremost tax haven. Liberland, which sits on 2.7 square-miles of land along the Danube River between Serbia and Croatia, was founded earlier this month and plans to have only voluntary taxes. "We don’t want the state to take money from the people," Vít Jedlička, a native of Prague and Liberland's new president, told Business Insider in a phone interview. "We want to have voluntary taxes." Elected into office by a three-person committee, Jedlička says he started Liberland to “turn the concept of a state upside down.” After working as a financial analyst...

There are more companies than people in the small US state of Delaware, its population of under one million nestled on the Atlantic coast just south of New Jersey. The reason is clear: the state offers companies low taxes, an efficient, pro-business legal environment, and it allows anyone to set up a company anonymously, registering a shell that hides who really controls it and controls the money within it. That has now put Delaware, and other states that permit shell companies, in the sights of the US authorities, after they have campaigned against international tax havens like Switzerland to fight...

Since I spend considerable time defending tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy, people sometimes think I can give competent advice on how best to protect one’s income from the IRS. Hardly. Like most people in Washington, I’m all theory and no practice.Besides, when people ask me about the ideal tax haven for an American citizen, I generally don’t have good news.I explain that they are already living in a very successful tax haven, but then given them the bad news that only nonresident foreigners can take advantage of America’s tax haven policies. Though we should still be happy about...

Venetians have voted overwhelmingly for their own sovereign state in a ‘referendum’ on independence from Italy. Inspired by Scotland’s separatist ambitions, 89 per cent of the residents of the lagoon city and its surrounding area, opted to break away from Italy in an unofficial ballot. The proposed ‘Repubblica Veneta’ would include the five million inhabitants of the Veneto region and could later expand to include parts of Lombardy, Trentino and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The floating city has only been part of Italy for 150 years. The 1000 year–old democratic Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia, was quashed by Napoleon and was subsumed into...

Pop quiz: When really nasty criminals and dictators want to hide their illicit gains, which country do they go to?I’ll make this easy for you - multiple choice:a) Switzerlandb) British Virgin Islandsc) Hong KongWith all the drama, history, and stigma surrounding Switzerland, most people would choose (A).Yet over the last few years, Switzerland has worked hard to shed this reputation, even going so far as to propose laws making it easier for them to freeze dictators’ funds.But in reality, the correct answer to the question is (D), none of the above. It’s the United States of America.Despite being at the...

France has decided to remove Jersey and Bermuda from its tax haven blacklist as they have been cooperative in sharing fiscal information. EurActiv France reports. According to a letter from the French finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, and the budget minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, to the rapporteur of the finance committee of the French parliament, Christian Eckert, the two island states gave positive responses to the requests for fiscal cooperation that France had demanded after they were added to the blacklist last August. The blacklist consists of non EU member countries that do not have an administrative assistance convention with France, which...

No matter how Jack Lew performs at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, his nomination to be Treasury Secretary has already produced one big winner: the Cayman Islands. The Caribbean low-tax haven is getting a political rehabilitation thanks to Mr. Lew's participation in a Cayman-based fund he invested in while working at Citigroup C +0.16% from 2006-2008. For years Democrats have denounced the Caymans, which has no corporate income tax, as a refuge for tax cheats. In 2012 President Obama ripped Mitt Romney for investments based there. But now an Obama spokesman suggests that Mr. Lew's Caymans investment, a Citigroup...

Switzerland hit back Tuesday at a US presidential election campaign video that portrays the country as a tax haven. In the video, a character named Miss Swiss Bank Account describes the Republican candidate Mitt Romney as a "boss millionaire with accounts everywhere", the ATS news agency reported. The film gives "the impression that having a bank account in Switzerland is dubious in itself and its only aim is to hide money from the tax authorities," Switzerland's Federal Department for Foreign Affairs (DFAE) said. Switzerland's Washington embassy reportedly expressed its unhappiness at the clip to the Obama team, ATS said.

Being the world’s self-appointed defender of so-called tax havens has led to some rather bizarre episodes.For instance, the bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development threatened to have me thrown in a Mexican jail for the horrible crime of standing in the public lobby of a hotel and giving advice to low-tax jurisdictions.On a more amusing note, my efforts to defend tax havens made me the beneficiary of grade inflation and I was listed as the 244th most important person in the world of global finance — even higher than George Soros and Paul Krugman.But if that makes...

he United States is drafting legal documents that seek to force nearly a dozen Swiss banks and international banks with Swiss branches to disclose the identities of American clients evading billions of dollars in taxes, sources briefed on the matter said. The drafting of the documents -- grand jury subpoenas and broad requests known as John Doe summonses -- is a fresh U.S. shot across the bow at Switzerland and its battered tradition of bank secrecy. The Alpine country, a noted tax haven that is the global capital of offshore private banking, has been under attack from U.S. Justice Department...

This is rich. Or should I say for the rich, whom John Kerry likes to denigrate at every turn. After running on eliminating outsourcing and abolishing tax havens, we have this: "Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry is docking his family's new $7 million yacht in neighboring Rhode Island, allowing him to avoid paying roughly $500,000 in taxes to the cash-strapped Bay State. If the "Isabel" were kept at the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee's summer vacation home on Nantucket, or in Boston Harbor near his city residence, he would be liable for $437,500 in one-time sales tax. He would also have to...