Some things about the Panama Papers that Singaporeans need to know.

[scroobal]

Bro, they all do the same thing and except this is based in Singapore. There are numerous firms like this in Singapore and all top banks that provide private banking all offer these things. I note that this firm is chaired by a former Commissioner of Police. With their wealth I am sure the Lee families would have numerous trusts set up to ensure their wealth is distributed according to their wishes.

My bigger worry are the Ang Mos who can't even get a job as a cleaner in their own country, marry a local or get a local girlfriend to register a company in Singapore and then attract investment from locals for new type of engine oil. land in England etc. So many Singaporeans sitting on worthless investments to the tune of millions.

And yes on the haze, I do agree with you. Despite all the chest thumping the culprits are Indonesian and Singaporean owners residing in Singapore probably next to our Minister of Foreign Affairs.

I wish to add to your observation.

I'm sure you've heard of TrustNet Portcullis whose mastermind is David Chong, a Cambridge-educated lawyer who speaks English with a crisp British accent. It basically does what that Panama company is doing, only better.

According to a little bird from the West, Familee have shares in the said company. Very astute observation.

Fortunately I'm thousands of miles away from this year's haze.

The haze also shows the world how inept and incapable our highest-paid politicians and ministars are,

 

[frenchbriefs]

Panama Papers reminds me of this song,

riding on my speedboat across the Panama canal under the pale moonlight carrying machine guns and rpgs in search of glory and the lost treasures of Temasek Holdings.

[video=youtube;h4T1MQGTV9U]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4T1MQGTV9U[/video]

 

[scroobal]

This is a good article, quite easy to understand. Notice that the bank account is in Singapore.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/magazine/my-big-fat-belizean-singaporean-bank-account.html?_r=0

My Big Fat Belizean, Singaporean Bank Account

By ADAM DAVIDSON JULY 24, 2012
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San Pedro, Belize. Credit Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
Earlier this month, I decided to see how hard it would be to set up my own offshore bank account. I figured it would be pretty difficult, because I’m not rich and don’t have a team of tax lawyers to oversee my money and because the E.U. and U.S. governments have been cracking down on tax havens by imposing stricter tax-sharing requirements. So I proceeded with some caution.

First, I Googled “company registration tax haven” and randomly picked three firms that set up accounts in offshore jurisdictions. Then I called each and explained that I was hoping to minimize my tax exposure and didn’t want anyone to know anything about my finances. Each company quickly noted that I should consult a lawyer to make sure that I wasn’t breaking the law. Then they calmly explained how to create an account that, it seemed to me, was unlikely to be discovered by the I.R.S. or any other authority.

I ended up working with A&P Intertrust, a Canadian company that I chose largely because I liked its Web site the best. (The other two companies’ sites appeared stuck in a late-’90s style with lots of flashing boxes.) A&P works with the governments of Panama, the British Virgin Islands and Belize. (Other companies that I contacted prefer the Seychelles, Cyprus or the Cayman Islands, where Mitt Romney has been reported to have money.) I decided to start my shell company in Belize because it would be exempt from all Belizean taxes and, as A&P’s site explained, “information about beneficial owners, shareholders, directors and officers is not filed with the Belize government and not available to the public.” And I’ve been to Belize and like the place.

Setting up the company was a lot cheaper than I expected. A&P charged $900 for a basic Belizean incorporation and another $85 for a corporate seal to emboss legal documents. For $650 more, A&P offered to open a bank account to stash my fledgling operation’s money in Singapore — a country, the Web site also noted, that “cannot gather information on foreigners’ bank accounts, bank-deposit interest and investment gains under domestic tax law.” And for another $690, it offered to assign a “nominee” who would be listed as the official manager and owner of my business but would report to me under a secret power-of-attorney contract. Then an A&P associate asked me to fill out the incorporation information online, just so she wouldn’t type in anything incorrectly. The whole thing took about 10 minutes.

Amazingly neither A&P nor I broke any law in Canada, Belize, Singapore or the United States. The company required, in compliance with international legal standards, that I e-mail it a notarized copy of my passport, driver’s license and some other identity documents. But a company representative also reassured me that these would not be visible to any tax authority. Just before they processed the paperwork, I explained that I was a journalist working on an article about offshore tax havens, and I haven’t heard from them since. (A representative from A&P declined to comment for this article, but he did note in an e-mail that the company was still “happy to serve [me] as a client.”)

Photo

Credit Illustration by Peter Oumanski
Setting up an account may be easy, but managing one is expensive. Following the law requires a team of lawyers and accountants to carefully monitor tax laws in dozens of countries and maintain accounts that stay on the safe side of confusing rules. It’s not really worth the cost for anyone other than wealthy investors looking to put aside money, tax-free, for future generations. Or for large multinationals who prefer to centralize their global cash-flow stream in a place that doesn’t tax corporations or require a lot of financial reporting. Why would a huge company like G.E. want to pay U.S. taxes every time its Spanish subsidiary sells parts to a company in Belarus when it could avoid them by incorporating offshore?

It’s easy to imagine that most other kinds of offshore activity are shady, but there is no definitive way to know, because we don’t even know how much money is in these centers. The estimates, however, are striking. The Bank for International Settlements, which collects voluntary reports from banks in 44 countries, offers the best single source of data. It counts around $31 trillion of foreign-owned assets in the world’s banks and estimates that about $4 trillion is in offshore financial centers. An estimated $1.5 trillion is in the Cayman Islands alone. The country of 52,000, which is about the size of Blaine, Minn., has more foreign-owned deposits than Japan or the Netherlands.

By the B.I.S.’s own estimation, the data — which do not include reports from Belize, the Seychelles and other offshore havens — are quite incomplete. The Tax Justice Network, a global research firm that advocates against such havens, suggests that the amount hidden offshore is between $21 trillion and $32 trillion. If properly taxed, that could yield more than $200 billion in revenue around the world. Furthermore, because a 2010 McKinsey & Company report estimated the world’s financial assets at about $200 trillion, somewhere around 10 percent or more of the world’s wealth is effectively invisible. And it’s also almost certainly in the hands of the people and institutions that most actively influence major investment decisions.

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Lately the United States and the European Union have expressed deep frustration with the international system of sharing tax information. In order to investigate my Belizean company’s bank account in Singapore, for instance, the I.R.S. would need to identify my bank and bank-account number, prove I had broken the law and then petition judges in Belize and Singapore to issue court orders forcing the release of my information. It’s a nearly impossible standard. It can also be easily undermined by enlarging the web of new accounts.

Next year, Washington will enact the most ambitious tax-recovery plan in history, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. Under Fatca, foreign financial firms will have to proactively identify every American account holder with assets of more than $50,000 and report details about their financial activity or face a significant penalty. The move is very unpopular among foreign banks, governments and Americans living abroad, but the more complex rules could actually mean more business for offshore centers. By the time Fatca is in full force, in 2017, truly wealthy individuals and corporations will almost certainly have used their resources to find more intricate loopholes.

One often-overlooked lesson of the financial crisis is that shenanigans don’t happen in the absence of regulation; they happen when regulations are exceedingly complex and involve confusing, overlapping regulatory authorities. Collateralized debt obligations and credit-default swaps were designed to squeeze through a labyrinth of laws, rules and taxes. And most of these toxic assets were formed in offshore jurisdictions, far from prying eyes and stricter reporting requirements. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, it took regulators and creditors more than a year to find out that the company comprised nearly 3,000 legal entities spread across 50 countries.

My colleagues at NPR’s “Planet Money” recently polled several economists of all political stripes and found that while they disagreed on the right level of taxation, they generally agreed that the overly complex taxation of rich people and corporations was disastrous. It all but guarantees that those people and companies will spend an inordinate amount of money figuring out how to game the system rather than come up with new ideas that improve the economy. Economists generally agree that the best tax system would be simple and strict, offering little incentive to lobby for loopholes. The big problem, of course, is that many of the people and corporations with the most influence over Congress don’t want it that way.

Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR's “Planet Money,” a podcast, blog and radio series heard on “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and “This American Life.”

 

[Thick Face Black Heart]

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/panama-papers-crimes/477156/?utm_source=SFFB

[ Highlights done by me. NOTICE Transparency International's failing. ]

In the past few days, hundreds (if not thousands) of media reports have linked the Panamanian wealth management firm Mossack Fonseca to a series of financial crimes. The massive “Panama Papers” leak documents the firm’s involvement in facilitating activities that may constitute fraud, money laundering, and theft, including by officials at the highest levels of governments worldwide. But the real scandal is that most of what Mossack Fonseca and the rest of the wealth-management industry do is perfectly legal.

Anyone reading this article can evade taxes, or even dabble in offshore finance, without expert intervention. With just an Internet connection and a few thousand dollars, anybody can create shell corporations and other offshore vehicles in a matter of minutes. It’s child’s play to dodge taxes, debts, child support, and so on by putting assets in one of those structures—though there is a risk of getting caught, audited, and possibly prosecuted.

But that’s not what many of the world’s richest people are doing: They can afford the privilege of defeating the spirit of the laws without violating them formally. What Mossack Fonseca and its counterparts all over the world really provide is the expertise that allows their clients to stay just on the right side of the law—or far enough into the legal grey zones that the clients have a real chance to prevail if they end up in court. That’s why many of the people who have seemingly been exposed by this leak will likely never face charges of any kind. To the extent that Mossack Fonseca’s work facilitated crime, that was a bug rather than a feature.

Understanding this may help resolve the cognitive dissonance that arises from reading about the Panama Papers against the insistence by Mossack Fonseca that their hands are clean. When the firm writes that “we have a strong compliance record” and “we are responsible members of the global financial and business community,” they are not lying through their teeth, as some might suspect. Keeping clients out of legal trouble is a core element of their business model: that is how they earn their money. If they, or firms like them, were to lose their reputations for keeping clients on the right side of the law, the clients would take their business elsewhere.

Some of the activity uncovered in the Panama Papers will turn out to be illegal. But if past is prologue, then the majority of what we learn from the leak will merely be embarrassing for those exposed—showing them to be opportunistic and perhaps unethical, but not criminal. And that is why many of the people named in the documents are unlikely to see the inside of a courtroom concerning the services that Mossack Fonseca provided to them: not because they have the power now to quash prosecutions (with some notable exceptions!), but because some time ago they had the power to hire expert advisers who carefully designed their tax-avoidance (or law-avoidance) strategies.

This kind of expertise is expensive, and can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, depending on which laws one wants to avoid. But paying for secrecy is typically worth it: If it weren’t for leaks like the Panama Papers, most people would have no idea that so much law avoidance is possible, let alone legally permitted. Many governments know about it, and as the Panama Papers reveal, many public officials take advantage of the benefits these firms provide.

That is one reason so many of their names appear in the leak: 140 politicians and officials from more than 50 countries. While some of those countries are known to have problems with fraud and crime by individuals in government, others are not. Iceland, France, Chile, and Botswana—all of which have officials listed as clients of Mossack Fonseca—are ranked highly on anti-corruption indexes such as the one from Transparency International. Use of offshore services by officials from those countries is unlikely to be connected to illegal activity, although it may well become a political liability for them.

That is how things shaped up for Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, who resigned following revelations that he was once part-owner of an offshore company incorporated with the help of Mossack Fonseca. Although the firm has been wholly owned by his wife since 2009, it stands to reap millions from the deal Gunnlaugsson negotiated for claimants on Iceland’s bankrupt financial institutions. Although reports show “no evidence to suggest tax avoidance, evasion, or any dishonest financial gain on the part of Gunnlaugsson,” his mere association with Mossack Fonseca and an offshore firm was enough to cost him his job, and possibly his career.

Public officials who want to put a stop to offshore financial activities face a losing battle due to entrenched conflicts of interest. Because these activities are often formally legal and extremely lucrative—particularly for nominally onshore countries—there is little will to shut them down, and thereby turn off the spigots of economic growth. This means that reform-minded officials are unlikely to gain the cooperation of their colleagues and government agencies in fighting against the secrecy and shell games through which the tax avoidance business operates. Anyone pushing for change rapidly comes to the realization that, at both the personal and institutional levels, many governments are deeply enmeshed in the kind of financial activities revealed by the Panama Papers. Often, the very same people who rail against tax avoidance and offshore finance are themselves beneficiaries of those strategies.

Take the U.K. as an example of this problem. Prime Minister David Cameron has been an outspoken opponent of “dodgy tax-avoiding schemes” by well-to-do U.K. citizens, describing such schemes as "morally wrong." At the 2013 meeting of the G8, Cameron spearheaded an international initiative to “fight the scourge of tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance.” But Cameron has also benefitted personally from such schemes, including an offshore corporation created by his late father Ian: Blairmore Holdings Inc., which is a client of Mossack Fonseca and incorporated in Panama, is still in operation and owns $31 million in assets. Profits from that corporation have never been taxed in the UK, and were reported to have been a part of the inheritance the Prime Minister received when his father died.

Even if Cameron lacked this personal conflict of interest, he would still face the problem of his country’s institutional entrenchment in tax avoidance and offshore finance. For example, the U.K. economy is closely tied to the offshore world through its property markets. Buying London real estate is among the favored method for oligarchs, particularly from Asia and the former Soviet states, to avoid taxes and launder the proceeds of corruption. Their investments, usually made through offshore corporations and trusts, have contributed significantly to the U.K. economy: London housing stock is now estimated to be worth more than the entire GDP of Brazil. Anything that impinged on those transactions, for example by making it harder to buy real estate through shell corporations, could deflate property values and threaten the British economy overall (although it might make the city affordable again for non-oligarchs).

Of equal or greater importance is the role of the City of London in the tax-haven business. The City, a square-mile financial services hub in the heart of the U.K.’s capital, serves as “the centre of the most important part of the global offshore system.” Last year, that square mile alone contributed $64 billion to the nation’s GDP, and its economic output is growing faster than that of the U.K. as a whole. Any move that impinges on offshore financial activity, including cracking down on tax avoidance, would strike directly at that important source of economic growth for the country. Thus, a former U.K. government official who worked under Cameron wrote that the Prime Minister cannot and will not make any real effort toward ending tax-haven activity, because such a move “would have severely hurt the City of London” and that ““it was and is a top U.K. government priority to head that off.”

The U.K. is far from unique in holding this conflicted position relative to the offshore world, and nations like Panama know it. For example, the U.S. has been very aggressive about cracking down on overseas tax avoidance in recent years. But it has also become a popular tax and secrecy haven in its own right, earning it the nickname “the new Switzerland.” Thus, calls by European and North American countries for crackdowns on “harmful tax competition” are increasingly met with derision and anger offshore. Panama and other offshore financial centers know that individual firms like Mossack Fonseca are just part of a web of “legal corruption” that reaches virtually every country in the world. Destroying that web would bring down many firms, and probably a few governments as well. So far, no one has been willing to do more than pull at a few strands at a time.

 

[scroobal]

I am sure that there is going to be lots of disappointed Singaporeans when the Panama Papers turn out to be a non-event. The fact that the Journalists took a year to put it together strikes me as they had not hit paydirt and were still digging. Wikileaks and the HSBC data thefts caught more people and led to more action against individuals.

 

[Leongsam]

Instead of complaining about the rich and how they avoid taxes, Sinkies should channel their energies into joining this club.

Being wealthy brings privileges. If the rich lived the same mundane existence as the poor nobody would bother putting in the effort to get rich and the world would have not moved forward the way it has.

There has been an explosion of wealth over the last decade and everyone has benefitted so we shouldn't begrudge the wealthy their just dues.

 

[Thick Face Black Heart]

Instead of complaining about the rich and how they avoid taxes, Sinkies should channel their energies into joining this club.

Being wealthy brings privileges. If the rich lived the same mundane existence as the poor nobody would bother putting in the effort to get rich and the world would have not moved forward the way it has.

There has been an explosion of wealth over the last decade and everyone has benefitted so we shouldn't begrudge the wealthy their just dues.

If other people remain impoverished, they cannot become my clients. Who suffers as a result? I do. That's why I care that society moves ahead together.

 

[Leongsam]

If other people remain impoverished, they cannot become my clients. Who suffers as a result? I do. That's why I care that society moves ahead together.

You're never going to create a system where everyone is your potential client. All you need is a critical mass.

China is a typical example. It has gone from abject poverty to being an economic powerhouse thanks to an injection of technology and money from the West. The trickle down effect has been simply amazing.

Apple alone has created a huge number of Chinese millionaires and swelled the middle class numbers manyfold.

 

[Jah_rastafar_I]

I am sure that there is going to be lots of disappointed Singaporeans when the Panama Papers turn out to be a non-event. The fact that the Journalists took a year to put it together strikes me as they had not hit paydirt and were still digging. Wikileaks and the HSBC data thefts caught more people and led to more action against individuals.

I am sure they are still digging. More people got exposed like jackie chan for example while his name was not mentioned when the PM of norway was exposed. It is an ongoing investigation so how the fuck can you predict the eventual outcome?

 

[Holdmetight]

I am sure they are still digging. More people got exposed like jackie chan for example while his name was not mentioned when the PM of norway was exposed. It is an ongoing investigation so how the fuck can you predict the eventual outcome?

The Panama papers are a welcome boon for those seeking justice against the ultra rich who exploit the system illegally. If the poor have to pay taxes why should the rich be allowed to escape? It is not fair.

I would like to see people go to jail for this. We need justice.