Pin-striped pirates: Swiss seem to be way behind British

[Guest dada_rocks]

http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20081216&fname=monbiot&sid=1 If you want to know why Britain has never completed the process of decolonisation, look at two lists side by side. One is the official register of tax havens, compiled by the OECD (1). The other is the list of British overseas territories and crown dependencies (2). Over a quarter of the world’s tax havens are British property. More than half of Britain’s colonial territories and dependencies are tax havens. Strip out Antarctica, the military bases and the scarcely-habited rocks and atolls, and of the 11 remaining properties, only the Falkland Islands is not a recognised haven. The obvious conclusion is that Britain retains these colonies for one purpose: to help banks, corporations and the ultra-rich to avoid tax. This authorised theft, of course, affects us too. We are robbed twice by these gangsters: once when they avoid the taxes the rest of us have to pay, again when the tax havens’ secret banking arrangements cause the crises which oblige us to rescue the banks. As the Tax Justice Network points out, the banking system collapsed because it became indecipherable. The banks lost confidence in each other when they could no longer tell who owns what or who owes whom, and could no longer trust each other’s financial statements(10). Nothing has done more to promote this distrust than the lucrative secrecy the tax havens offer to their clients. But the crime havens have become so respectable that even the British government is now depriving itself of revenue. It has become the major shareholder in the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has offshore subsidiaries in Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and Gibralter(12). Have the bank’s new owners, in return for our generosity in bailing it out, demanded that it shuts these operations? No. And that’s not the worst of it. The Inland Revenue, responsible for collecting tax in this country, signed a private finance initiative deal transferring its buildings to a company called Mapeley Steps(13). Mapeley Steps, which is registered in one tax haven (Bermuda) is owned by Mapeley, registered in another (Guernsey). Mapeley has boasted of paying no income or corporation tax in any jurisdiction(14).