Judge says Trio fraud
INVESTORS with $123 million in an offshore fund managed by Trio Capital have almost certainly been victims of a ”fraudulent scam”, a NSW Supreme Court judge ruled yesterday. Justice George Palmer detailed ”vices” in Trio’s business and ruled it was in the public interest to wind up five schemes that it managed, including the controversial fund Astarra Strategic. He was scathing about Astarra’s use of tax havens in the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla, St Lucia, the Cayman Islands, Belize, the Cook Islands and Nevis. More than $400 million invested in Trio has been frozen since October, when fears were raised that the $123 million invested in Astarra was the subject of a Ponzi scheme.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/judge-says-trio-fraud-20100416-skin.html
Seven Ex-UBS Clients Accused by U.S. of Tax Crimes
Seven former UBS AG clients, including two who pleaded guilty, were accused of collectively hiding more than $100 million from the Internal Revenue Service as the U.S. extends its crackdown on offshore tax evasion. U.S. prosecutors in New York today released indictments against Shmuel Sternfeld, Sybil Nancy Upham, Ernest Vogliano and Richard Werdiger, as well as a criminal complaint against Kenneth Heller. Federico Hernandez, 44, and Jules Robbins pleaded guilty today in federal court in New York. Upham, 72, and Werdiger, 62, pleaded not guilty to their indictments.
OECD crackdown on tax havens seen lacking teeth
Over the past year, the number of countries on an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development “gray list” of tax havens that have not fully implemented internationally agreed upon tax standards has dropped to 17 from more than 40. But some say the havens are getting off lightly, and that it is more or less business as usual. For starters, they say the number of TIEAs a country needs to sign to get off the “gray list” list is far too low at 12. In addition, the countries tax havens sign with may have little money moving offshore. Take the example of the Bahamas, a balmy Atlantic archipelago and international financial center that is home to more than 250 licensed bank and trust companies. It moved off the OECD “gray list” in March after signing 18 TIEAs, surpassing the 12 required bilateral agreements. These included TIEAs with the “Nordic Seven,” which include Sweden and Norway, but also Greenland and the Faroes Islands.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63H2BI20100418
Now we know the truth. The financial meltdown wasn’t a mistake – it was a con
The global financial crisis, it is now clear, was caused not just by the bankers’ colossal mismanagement. No, it was due also to the new financial complexity offering up the opportunity for widespread, systemic fraud. Friday’s announcement that the world’s most famous investment bank, Goldman Sachs, is to face civil charges for fraud brought by the American regulator is but the latest of a series of investigations that have been launched, arrests made and charges made against financial institutions around the world. Big Finance in the 21st century turns out to have been Big Fraud. Yet Britain, centre of the world financial system,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/18/goldman-sachs-regulators-civil-charges
Bloomberg’s Offshore Millions
It was a dark time for the city. In 2008, and early into the next year, morale was low, Wall Street was sputtering and Mayor Michael Bloomberg was steeling New Yorkers for pain. Brace for service cuts and tax hikes, he warned–while also pledging to find a way to keep tax money, particularly from the city’s richest citizens, from fleeing. “I’ve said this before, but the first rule of taxation is, you can’t tax too much those that can move,” Mr. Bloomberg intoned on a radio show late in the crisis. “You know, we’re yelling and screaming about the rich. We want the rich from around this county to move here. We love the rich people.”
http://www.observer.com/2010/politics/bloomberg%E2%80%99s-offshore-millions
Money Talks – Especially in Swiss Politics
Even though, as the dateline indicates, I am writing today from Panama, my subject is Switzerland and what has every appearance of being a major surrender of many ruling Swiss politicians to U.S. government blackmail. A few weeks ago I commented on the utter gall of officials of the Swiss banking giant, UBS, warning, (in their own self-serving view), that the entire Swiss financial industry was at risk — unless Swiss lawmakers approve a revised tax treaty with the U.S. that overrides the 1934 Swiss bank secrecy law. It also annuls two recent Swiss court decisions upholding that law.
If Parliament fails to approve the IRS blackmail, Obama’s IRS storm troopers are threatening to reopen the U.S. lawsuit against UBS and close down the Zurich-based bank’s operations in the U.S. where some 20,000 UBS employees work; so much for Obama job creation in a U.S. recession.
http://baumanblog.sovereignsociety.com/2010/04/money-talks-especially-in-swiss-politics.html
Why More U.S. Expatriates Are Turning In Their Passports
Chicago native Ben loves his country and is proud to be an American. Yet the longtime resident of Melbourne has just relinquished his U.S. citizenship. “This is not something I did lightly or happily, but I saw no other choice,” says Ben, a businessman who became an Australian citizen two years ago. While a small number of Americans hand in their passports each year for political reasons, the new surge in permanent expatriations is mainly because of taxes. Considering that an estimated 3 million to 6 million Americans reside abroad, the number of renouncements is small. But expatriate organizations say the recent increase reflects a growing dissatisfaction with the way the U.S. government treats its expats and their money: the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that taxes its overseas citizens, subjecting them to taxation in both their country of citizenship and country of residence.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1983238,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
Colorado Gets a C for Its Civil Asset Forfeiture Laws
The libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice (IJ) has put out a tremendous new report on abusive civil asset forfeiture practices in the United States called “Policing for Profit.” As the report notes, federal and state asset forfeiture laws often create perverse incentives for abuse by making civil forfeiture “relatively easy for the government and hard for property owners to fight.” The civil forfeiture laws were supposed to help fight the war on drugs, by making sure that crime wouldn’t pay. But this broken system also sweeps innocent property owners into its net, seizing money based on a premise of drug activity with no hard evidence and no requirement to prove anything to a judge. It’s no surprise that asset forfeiture practices disproportionately impact low-income, hard-working African-American or Hispanic people who the police decide look suspicious and who have little means to challenge their plight.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-krause/colorado-gets-a-c-for-its_b_541182.html
Whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld: Some U.S. pols kept off-shore accounts with UBS
A former banker who blew the whistle on thousands of secret bank accounts rich Americans held at Swiss giant UBS claimed Thursday some U.S. politicians also kept off-shore accounts with the bank. “We had an office in Washington that we all referred to as the PEP office – for ‘Politically Exposed People,’” Bradley Birkenfeld said. He was speaking by phone – on tax day, no less – from Schuylkill County federal prison in Pennsylvania, where he is serving a 40-month sentence for his role in the tax evasion scheme. Executives from the bank’s U.S. subsidiary, UBS America, he added, helped promote those off-shore accounts through a New York “referral desk” that steered U.S. clients to their Swiss colleagues, and through dozens of high society events that the U.S. subsidiary often sponsored.
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