Off Topic Politics Thread

Think you've nailed em DTLW.

 

UK tax investigators have written to media organisations, including the Guardian, to request access to the huge trove of 11.5m secret offshore files leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

In the UK, Vicky Ranson of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), said tax officials were keen to obtain the data. In a letter to the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, she said HMRC was “relentlessly pursuing tax evasion by UK citizens and residents” and wanted“to ensure that tax cheats have no safe havens in which to hide undeclared income”.

Ranson, director of HMRC’s risk and intelligence service, added: “I am very keen to obtain this data from you so we can cross-reference it with our own extensive data, to see whether there is information that we do not have and which could be useful as part of our extensive investigations into offshore tax evasion.”

In a statement, the Guardian said: “We have received the request from HMRC and will consult with our international partners.”
http://www.theguardian.com/news/201...access-to-huge-leak-of-mossack-fonseca-papers

 

Those leaks are shocking. particularly the one from South Africa where the money laundering from the fund paying widows and orphans of dead miners left people suddenly with no money. I know it is all disgusting stuff but it is the ones that actually affect people who need money that are the most sickening. Will be interesting to see just how many people are taken to task over this lot or whether it will be a case of some notional token prosecutions across the world to show they are acting and then forget about the rest.

The PM of Iceland is under pressure though I see.

Are either of the US presidential candidates (the 2 that are likely to win) mentioned at all anywhere?

 

US stuff hasn't been leaked yet.

 

I will be astonished if the democrat candidate and/or her business partner are not in there somewhere. Seems right up their street.

 

Despite 8 years of concentrated dirt digging by some very powerful and well connected people, the only thing Bill Clinton's enemies could make stick was a blow job from an intern. So what are you basing your assumptions on?

 

There have been lots of reporting on many indiscretions involving money disappearing from a certain fund and bullying of people that do have dirt on them and a long list of people that have died that would have insider knowledge.

Remember the female of the species is more deadly than the male

 

Oh god, please not the Clinton Death Count. The Time Cube guy had more credibility.

Fun fact: the Obama Death Count features many of the same people, somehow murdered by him for entirely different reasons.

 

That's just what our masters, the aliens, want you to think.

 

You know too much. Chelsea will be arriving shortly with an ice pick and a shovel.

 

You mean the mice.

 

http://www.ibtimes.com/panama-paper...eal-amid-warnings-it-would-make-money-2348076

 

One line that appears in that link I posted above:

Major corporations also lobbied for the deal, including, among others, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which at the time maintained 136 Panamanian subsidiaries, according to huffington post

 

I still maintain she was in the wrong. He just wanted her to sack his cook.

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...s-favorite-new-tax-haven-is-the-united-states

 

This isn't so new; Delaware has been a notorious tax haven for years. You can open a company there without any ID. It has more companies than people.

We're not terribly clean either. Until 2015 you could form a company whose shares were denoted as "bearer shares", i.e. whoever had possession of the share certificates owned the company.

http://www.economist.com/news/speci...an-be-laxer-offshore-sort-not-palm-tree-sight

The problem with all this is that it's the laws that are at fault. The UK tax code is now over 20,000 pages long. Too many daft incentives and daft rules for companies to game.

Vin

 

Several of the donors, MPs and financiers who have supported David Cameron’s rise to power have had links to the UK’s network of tax havens, the Panama Papers reveal.

Three former Conservative MPs and six members of the House of Lords are among those with connections to companies on the books of the offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca.

Tony Buckingham
Michael Mates
Anthony Bamford
David Rowland
The Fleming family
Howard Flight
Sir Tony Baldry
Sir Edward du Cann
Lord Astor of Hever
Juniper Equities Trading
Lord Bilimoria
Arron Banks

http://www.theguardian.com/news/201...fshore-firms-revealed-in-leaked-panama-papers

 

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