How much money is currently OUTSIDE the country? Who made this LEGAL???!!!!
So, let me get this straight - Not only do our tax laws provide the wealthiest Americans with an enormous tax break, but these leading banks are providing their wealthy clients with tax havens and protections by creating shell companies in offshore accounts....thus shifting the tax burden almost entirely onto the backs of the majority of working class Americans.
And now, to add to this obscenity, the working class is also BAILING THESE BANKS OUT!!!!
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Excerpt from Mother Jone's article,
Trillion Dollar Hideaway:
Secret accounts have traditionally been the province of private banks in Switzerland, Austria, and Luxembourg. But those nations have lost favor among depositors in recent years as they have eased bank secrecy laws in response to international pressure. Small states in the Caribbean and the South Pacific, eager to offset declining tourism and lower prices for farm exports, have rushed to fill the void, turning to offshore banking as an easy and effective means of attracting big money from abroad (see "Tropic of Tax Cheats," this page).
But it's not just microstates that are profiting from the offshore boom. The world's largest financial institutions are also growing richer by offering private banking services to their top clients. Big-time American players include Merrill Lynch, Chase Manhattan, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. The leading U.S. private banker is Citibank, which administers trusts and shell corporations for some 40,000 clients through its operations in New York, London, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Jersey, and Switzerland.
To open an account, private banking clients must generally deposit at least $1 million. According to a report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, private bankers then assign the client a "relationship manager" who creates offshore trusts, handles all financial transactions -- and helps ensure secrecy. "Private banks routinely create shell companies and trusts to shield the identity of the beneficial owner of a bank account," the report states. "Private banks also open accounts under code names and will, when asked, refer to clients by code names or encode account transactions."
One former private banker who had more than 30 clients, each with as many as 15 shell companies, told the subcommittee that his own bank prohibited him from keeping any records linking front operations to their owners. In another case, Federal Reserve examiners asked Bankers Trust to create a database identifying the owners of shell companies. The bank complied -- by setting up the database on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, which requires U.S. investigators to request names on a case-by-case basis from Jersey courts. The effort to create and shelter multiple accounts "complicates regulatory oversight and law enforcement," the Senate subcommittee concluded, "making it nearly impossible for an outside reviewer to be sure that all private bank accounts belonging to an individual have been identified."
The secrecy makes it easy for clients of private banks to hide their wealth, whatever its source. Citibank's clients have included the family of Sani Abacha, the former Nigerian general who plundered billions of dollars from his nation's treasury, and dictator Omar Bongo of Gabon, for whom Citibank established a Bahamian shell corporation to stash his looted treasure. Citibank also helped Raul Salinas, brother of former Mexican president Carlos Salinas, by transferring tens of millions of dollars out of Mexico and depositing the money in European banks under the names of untraceable companies registered in the Cayman Islands. Citibank never used Salinas' name in bank communications, referring to him instead as "Confidential Client Number 2," or "CC-2."
"CC-1" was the code used to refer to Carlos Hank Rhon, who is currently facing civil charges by the Federal Reserve that he used secret offshore accounts to illegally hide his controlling interest in Laredo National Bank, the third-largest independent bank in Texas. A Mother Jones review of Fed documents reveals that Citibank handled more than $100 million for Hank Rhon, funneling his money through accounts in New York, Mexico, London, Zurich, the Bahamas, and the British Virgin Islands. According to one filing in the case, Citibank not only decided what offshore entities to establish, but designated its own employees as officers, directors, and trustees.
Setting up and managing offshore accounts has become big business for major banks. Federal Reserve officials call private banking a "profit driver" for many financial institutions, providing returns twice as high as other services. In overseeing the Hank Rhon accounts, documents show, Citibank earned $3.2 million in fees in one year alone.
"This is a huge piece of business for them," says Jack Blum, a Washington, D.C. attorney and an expert on offshore banking. "There are significant departments at most major banks that cater to this trade. The business of hiding money offshore is one that most banks engage in." ...>
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/11/offshore.html
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