Thread by @doctorow

A key lesson from the #PandoraPapers is that "tax haven" is a gross misnomer. In reality, the distant, finance-blighted treasure islands are not where the dirty money ends up - of course not, there's nothing to buy there.

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If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/10/07/mar…

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The "offshore" sector is like a pinball flipper - plutes and crooks bounce their money off of these tiny, out-of-the-way places, and they fire it back across the ocean, typically through an "onshore-offshore" secrecy haven.

pluralistic.net/2021/10/04/avo…

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In the USA, there are several states that compete to be the intermediate resting place these secret fortunes: Delaware, the granddaddy of them all, has been surpassed by Wyoming, Nevada, and, most recently and ferociously, South Dakota.

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In the EU, onshore-offshore nations like Cyprus, Malta and Luxembourg bend over backwards to launder great, ugly fortunes into the rich world, where they can acquire real-estate, yachts, supercars, and large stakes in voracious private equity firms.

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But when it comes to onshore-offshore, no one can hold a candle to the UK. It's not just its globe-spanning commonwealth of treasure islands, nor the close-to-hand Channel Islands.

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It doesn't even stop with the notorious crime-zone euphemistically called "The City" - a square mile so filled with scum and villainy that it had to annex Canary Wharf to make room for more.

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You also find it in Scotland. The Scottish Limited Partnership is the UK's most favored "financial secrecy vehicle," a friendly home for the former USSR's most brutal dictators, gangsters and oligarchs, who laundered over $100b through SLPs.

heraldscotland.com/business_hq/15…

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Tories in the UK Parliament defeated the SNP's efforts to meaningfully regulate to end the corruption:

https://twitter.com/alisonthewliss/status/991345455631142914

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The ensuing "investigation" was dead on arrival, deliberately so limited in scope that it could not possible produce real reform:

nakedcapitalism.com/2018/12/uks-re…

The "crackdown" that it produced was understaffed and anemic:

heraldscotland.com/news/16192718.…

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Today, SLPs remain a favored vehicle for laundering the world's dirtiest criminal money, like a Ukrainian crime gang that defrauded Europeans of eur10m/month.

opendemocracy.net/en/odr/europea…

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They were able to do so because they were able to violate the SLP compliance rules - and they were able to do THAT because no one is enforcing those rules, allowing them to dissolve and reform numbered, anonymous companies to avoid scrutiny.

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It turns out that if you do nothing meaningful to end financial crimes, and instead just put on a pantomime about ending financial crimes, criminal will not cooperating with the pantomime, and will continue to commit crimes.

eof/