masterblaster72 0 #1 April 5, 2013 Secret Files Expose Offshore’s Global Impact Best journalistic work done in a long time and absolutely worth putting the time aside to read. A snippet from the intro: QuoteThe leaked files provide facts and figures — cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals — that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike. The records detail the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories. The hoard of documents represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization. The total size of the files, measured in gigabytes, is more than 160 times larger than the leak of U.S. State Department documents by Wikileaks in 2010. To analyze the documents, ICIJ collaborated with reporters from The Guardian and the BBC in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other media partners around the world. Eighty-six journalists from 46 countries used high-tech data crunching and shoe-leather reporting to sift through emails, account ledgers and other files covering nearly 30 years. “I’ve never seen anything like this. This secret world has finally been revealed,” said Arthur Cockfield, a law professor and tax expert at Queen’s University in Canada, who reviewed some of the documents during an interview with the CBC. He said the documents remind him of the scene in the movie classic The Wizard of Oz in which “they pull back the curtain and you see the wizard operating this secret machine.” more QuoteThe anonymity of the offshore world makes it difficult to track the flow of money. A study by James S. Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey & Company, estimates that wealthy individuals have $21 trillion to $32 trillion in private financial wealth tucked away in offshore havens — roughly equivalent to the size of the U.S. and Japanese economies combined. Even as the world economy has stumbled, the offshore world has continued to grow, said Henry, who is a board member of the Tax Justice Network, an international research and advocacy group that is critical of offshore havens. His research shows, for example, that assets managed by the world’s 50 largest “private banks” — which often use offshore havens to serve their “high net worth” customers — grew from $5.4 trillion in 2005 to more than $12 trillion in 2010. Henry and other critics argue that offshore secrecy has a corrosive effect on governments and legal systems, allowing crooked officials to loot national treasuries and providing cover to human smugglers, mobsters, animal poachers and other exploiters. This has the potential to rock the world, and its effect may be felt stateside too, as more than 4,000 Americans are named in the findings. Be humble, ask questions, listen, learn, follow the golden rule, talk when necessary, and know when to shut the fuck up. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
aphid 0 #2 April 5, 2013 Hopefully, you'll receive more response than the similar thread I started yesterday. Apparently they have more important things to consider... http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4466564 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Andy9o8 2 #3 April 5, 2013 Quote Hopefully, you'll receive more response than the similar thread I started yesterday. Apparently they have more important things to consider... http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=4466564 Oh, bullshit. What's this stuff (or yours) compared to crucial issues of the day like hi-capacity gun mags, or f-you tats? Get some perspective, eh? Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
