Cap-and-Trade Model Loses Billions to Fraud

[FreakinDJ]

Cap-and-Trade Model Loses Billions to Fraud

As negotiators grapple in Copenhagen over a global scheme to curtail carbon emissions, Europe's own iteration was revealed as an easy mark for organized crime. The development could lend fresh ammunition to congressional critics of the Obama administration's plans to limit carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade system.

Europol, the European Union's joint criminal intelligence agency, announced that in the last 18 months, criminals have gamed the EU's Emissions Trading System for a cool $7.4 billion in purloined tax revenues.

The EU's ETS, the world's largest existing carbon emissions trading scheme founded in 2005, serves as a model, for better or worse, for global trading schemes being discussed now in Copenhagen. After getting off to a slow start -- at first, European governments set the carbon caps so high that many power companies were profiting from the credits without having to cut their emissions -- the trade started to balloon suspiciously late last year. By the time volume peaked last May and early June, Europol investigators say, up to 90 percent of the trade in some European countries was totally bogus.

So how does a would-be Bernie Madoff make money trading intangibles like carbon credits? The scam was relatively simple: Fraudulent traders bought carbon credits tax-free in one European country, then sold them in another at a markup by including value-added tax, which varies from 15 to 25 percent among EU member states.

http://www.sphere.com/world/article/europes-cap-and-trade-model-loses-billions-to-fraud/19274092

The Dem Party will be Toast in the next election if the current Kyoto Protocol is passed in the Senate.

Not only will it levy HUGE taxes to be given to our competeing manufacturing countries, it will bury the American public into servitude to their new Chinese Overloards.

All the while - It will not REDUCE carbon emissions 1 Iota as China has only pledged to reduce "Intensity" and not overall CO2 output. This means China's Green House Gas output will continue to rise for decades.

[TheWraith]

1. Nice Republican talking points. Thanks for sharing them. nt

[FreakinDJ]

2. Bummer Kyoto Protocol is a scam

I've been on these forums fighting for Democratic reforms a lot longer the you Johny Come-Lately.

[FarCenter]

3. Cap and trade is the same old "free markets solve everything" Greenspanian BS

[Odin2005]

4. 2 words: CARBON TAX

[bananas]

8. The OP is about TAX FRAUD

[kenny blankenship]

5. It's centered around a carbon derivatives market designed by the same bankster who invented CDS

what could go wrong?

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/12/woman-who-invented-credit-default-swaps.html

[FreakinDJ]

6. Who would Da Thunk It

thanks for the link

[bananas]

7. "the criminals simply never sent that money to tax authorities as required"

LOL - a carbon tax will be immune to fraud? Nope.