New locales enter the offshore secrecy market

[Joe Shlabotnik]

From West Africa to Tibet, new locales enter the offshore secrecy market

In most of the world, offshore tax havens are facing dark days. In June, members of the G8 agreed to crack down on offshore tax evasion, and further reforms are expected at a G20 summit this month. Even some of the world’s best known tax shelters are starting to change their ways: the British Virgin Islands just entered talks with the US Treasury on compliance with US tax law, and the Swiss government just approved an agreement for Swiss banks to pay hefty fines for sheltering tax fugitives.

But in some countries, the appeal of secretive international capital remains too strong to pass up. Despite the broad crackdown on existing tax havens – or perhaps because of it – these countries and localities are loosening their tax and transparency laws in the hopes of becoming the next offshore destinations.

John Christensen, the director of Tax Justice Network, an advocacy group that campaigns against financial secrecy, said that efforts to clamp down on offshore havens came mostly from membership groups such as the European Union, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the G8. “The pressure might appear to be global, in fact it’s quite regionally constrained,” Christensen said. “Outside those regional groupings and political groupings countries are starting to see opportunities.”

The world’s aspiring tax havens are located in areas from eastern Europe to a tiny coastal nation in West Africa to a province high in the Himalayas in Tibet. Christensen said that a common factor among them was weak governance, and that new entrants to the offshore market are likelier to attract illicit funds. “They’re much more likely to try to compete at the more dirty end of the spectrum, attracting capital from within their region,” he said.

http://www.icij.org/blog/2013/09/west-africa-tibet-new-locales-enter-offshore-secrecy-market

Emerging safe havens for dodging tax: The Gambia, Latvia, Shannan prefecture Tibet, Nairobi, Kenya, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands and Bitcoin

[KamaAina]

1. Isn't Puerto Rico part of the United States?

Then again, Delaware's business laws have been decribed as more secretive than those of, say, the Cayman Islands. Wyoming isn't far behind.