Banks say tax rules cracking down on property speculation force them to screen for money-laundering at their own cost. Banks are refusing to open accounts for foreigners if they think the costs outweigh the benefits. New property and tax laws launched late last year made “offshore persons” buying or selling… – Continue reading
A change to our tax rules aimed at foreign property investors is likely to affect many people, a tax expert says. A bill poised to be passed by Parliament this week may increase the red tape for anyone based overseas doing taxable business with this country. The Taxation (Residential Land… – Continue reading
SINGAPORE (BLOOMBERG) – Singapore’s biggest banks are in talks about setting up a system for sharing information on prospective clients, in an effort to combat money laundering in the city-state. DBS Group Holdings, OCBC and UOB are exploring the possibility of a countrywide model for anti-money laundering and enhanced client… – Continue reading
As with any offshore financial centre, secrecy has been synonymous with the Channel Islands of Jersey. But the reason for the strong relations between the self-governing British dependency and the United Arab Emirates – still not known to many – is not confidentiality alone. It has not been so long… – Continue reading
Scandal-plagued Norwegian bank DNB has agreed to turn over information to state tax authorities about Norwegian customers who have held bank accounts set up in tax havens by DNB’s own operation in Luxembourg. The future of DNB’s board of directors, meanwhile, was in doubt following heavy criticism that neither DNB’s… – Continue reading
Greek banks and the state are in the process of creating a national register for offshore company owners, in compliance with a European Union directive to that effect. The register will be created on the Teiresias databank, known from its list of insolvent borrowers. Access will be granted to the… – Continue reading
History shows us that tax evasion can have terrible effects, from economic inequality to societal collapse. In a world seemingly inured to financial scandals, the Panama Papers leak has reminded us of their capacity to shock. This huge document dump, which has revealed thousands of offshore accounts held in the… – Continue reading
Overview If you have been reading my articles on JD Supra for a while, you will know that I love Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music. Nevertheless, the Hall and Oates song Private Eyes, is a more fitting song to describe the state of offshore planning in Tax Havens than “Oye Como… – Continue reading
The U.S. Treasury Department is finalising new tax rules aimed at combating the use of shell companies to evade taxes, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said on Saturday amid increased pledges by global finance leaders to cooperate on tax issues. In a statement to the International Monetary Fund’s steering committee,… – Continue reading
The government should immediately withdraw key tax avoidance provisions from the income tax law and investigate sources of foreign remittances under section 111(4) of the Income Tax Ordinance 2001 and other blanket amnesty/immunity clauses in the tax laws through Statutory Regulatory Orders (SROs). A tax lawyer Waheed Shahzad Butt told… – Continue reading
India and Maldives today signed two agreements for exchange of information with respect to taxes, and for avoidance of double taxation of income derived from international air transport. The agreements were signed during the visit of President of Maldives Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom to New Delhi. Gayoom is on a… – Continue reading
Panama is a tax haven, but Mauritius is one with which India has a comprehensive double tax treaty. This complicates matters more. In popular Indian imagination, a tax haven is generally associated with Switzerland and its numbered bank accounts. But tax havens are numerous, have grown in importance, and are… – Continue reading
BERLIN – A European Union official threatened Thursday to sanction Panama and other nations if they don’t cooperate fully to fight money laundering and tax evasion, after a leak of data showed the small country remains a key destination for people wanting to hide money. The 11.5 million documents from… – Continue reading
Much of the activity is legal, but it siphons away billions in tax revenue from government coffers The massive Panama Papers data leak shines a light not only on the dirty money being shuffled through tax havens, but also on the legal and common use of offshore accounts to significantly… – Continue reading
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued its most recent report on Belize on Monday, following its September 2014 mission to the country, led by Jacques Bouhga-Hagbe. Much of the economic data included in the report has been the subject of recent discussions in Parliament in the context of the 2016-2017… – Continue reading
The Swiss Federal Administrative Court has ruled that no administrative assistance can be provided by Switzerland in response to a group request submitted by the tax authority in the Netherlands (in decision A-8400/2015). In upholding the appeal by a Dutch client of Swiss bank UBS, the court blocked the request… – Continue reading
Authorities in China’s southeastern coastal province of Zhejiang cracked down on 115 cases of underground banking involving transactions totalling more than 900 billion yuan (HK$ 1.07 trillion) in 2015, state media reports. The success of the campaign underscored the efforts of Beijing to rein in illegal capital outflows, which hit… – Continue reading
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has askedMauritius to set up a ‘macro-prudential authority’ to monitor the offshore investments from the island. One of the largest destinations of such offshore investments is the Indian stock market. The proposed authority will have a central role for the banking regulator, the Bank of… – Continue reading
Switzerland is barred from helping the Netherlands in a tax case that centres on a Dutch client of UBS (UBSG.S) after a Swiss court ruled that requested details were too broad to be covered by the information-sharing agreement between the countries. The Swiss Federal Administrative Court sided with a Dutch… – Continue reading
The investigation and prosecution of tax evasion has, in the last decade, grown from a specialised subcategory of law enforcement into a first-tier policy concern for the global community.Starting with the US government’s crackdown on Swiss bank UBS in 2008, there has been a steady drumbeat of news about prosecutions… – Continue reading
The Mauritius central bank said it has issued a banking licence to Bank of China , the first Chinese bank licensed to operate on the Indian Ocean island. Zhang Xiaoqing, who is leading a team setting up the Mauritius unit, said Bank of China wanted to provide financial services to… – Continue reading
LONDON & NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Markit (Nasdaq:MRKT), a leading global provider of financial information services, today announced the launch of a tax utility. The initial offering supports compliance with US Treasury FATCA obligations. Designed in partnership with Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Morgan Stanley, the service provides tax form validation and secure… – Continue reading
A record high 1,163,229 Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (more commonly, FBARs) were filed in 2015, up more than 8% from the prior year. That growth, however, is nothing new: FBAR filings have grown on average by 17% per year during the last five years , according to… – Continue reading
China’s chess game to seize control of the South China Sea may take an interesting turn if an influential businessman’s suggestion is followed and Beijing turns one of the disputed islands into its very own Cayman Islands-style offshore bank. The idea, as explained by The Washington Post, is to establish… – Continue reading
Mauritius plans to sell itself as a world class financial-services hub to investment companies in Asia and the Far East to win new business, an official said. The island-nation’s Financial Services Promotional Agency plans to market the country as an international financial center, or IFC, and is already collaborating with… – Continue reading
Two units of Cayman National Corporation Ltd pleaded guilty to U.S. charges on Wednesday as part of a $6 million settlement of an investigation into how the financial services firm helped Americans evade paying taxes. Cayman National Securities Ltd and Cayman National Trust Co Ltd each pleaded guilty in federal… – Continue reading
Debt planning and restructuring is a common mechanism to minimize taxable income by increasing deductions among different entities in a multinational group of companies. As interest on debt is generally a deductible expense of the payor and taxed in the hands of the payee, groups may create intercompany loans to… – Continue reading
Twenty Caribbean and Latin American nations have been named by the U.S. as “major money laundering” countries in the 2016 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) from the U.S. State Department released Wednesday, Mar. 2, 2016. A major money laundering is defined by statute as one “whose financial institutions engage… – Continue reading
They are considering clubbing together to ship large amounts of US dollars to their offshore bank accounts as the result of a new Central Bank policy toward physical notes. The Central Bank recently stopped accepting physical dollar deposits from commercial banks, said several bankers at private lenders, who were not… – Continue reading
The pet project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi – the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) – housed in the Gujarat International Finance Tec City – has received a boost in the Union Budget 2016/17. The long pending tax issue has been decided with 9 per cent minimum alternate tax (MAT),… – Continue reading
While the various reforms initiated by the Centre has led to a significant increase in FDI inflows into India, the Economic Survey feels the need for a closer examination of such FDI flows to determine whether there has been any instances of tax evasion. The survey noted that out of… – Continue reading
“It is tantamount to an economic blockade”. That’s how Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister, Gaston Browne, described the current withdrawal from Caribbean indigenous and offshore banks of correspondent relationships by US banks. His sentiments were echoed by Dean Barrow and Freundel Stuart, the prime ministers of Belize and Barbados respectively…. – Continue reading
The OECD’s base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) project – which is aimed at closing gaps and mismatches in tax laws that conspire to reduce corporate tax liability – is a game-changer for treasury planning. The final reports of the BEPS Action Plan, announced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation… – Continue reading
In its time, the Irving empire has had plenty of federal contracts — all of them lucrative, many of them controversial. So it wasn’t a surprise to hear that a federal cabinet committee is reviewing Irving’s $26 billion sole-source (but still unsigned) contract to build a fleet of warships for… – Continue reading
Malta has always insisted it is no tax haven, but it employs a system which allows foreign shareholders to claim a six-sevenths’ refund on their taxed dividends, taxed at the maximum 35%. There’s a new battle lining up for the Maltese government inside Brussels: an aggressive fight against tax avoidance… – Continue reading
The Government has released an issues paper on New Zealand’s implementation of an OECD initiative the OECD claims will “end banking secrecy as we have known it.” The OECD’s Automatic Exchange Of Information (AEOI) initiative is setting a global standard for sharing information between countries with the aim of reducing… – Continue reading
New Delhi :The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has issued a clarification with regard to an inter-governmental agreement between India and USA signed for implementation of Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). The CBDT further said in its statement that the Government of India has also joined the Multilateral… – Continue reading
Having launched and led the battle against offshore tax evasion, America is now part of the problem DEVIN NUNES raised eyebrows in 2013 when, as chairman of a congressional working group on tax, he urged reforms that would make America “the largest tax haven in human history”. Though he was… – Continue reading
Axis Bank, India’s third-largest private bank by assets, is aiming to open branches in Sharjah and Bahrain by March next year as part of plans of increasing its presence in the Arabian Gulf region, a senior executive said. Axis Bank has nine overseas offices: branches at Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai-DIFC,… – Continue reading
The Government recently introduced into the Legislative Council a bill to provide a legal framework for the implementation of automatic exchange of financial account information in tax matters (“AEOI”). This would have significant implications both for financial institutions and, in a cosmopolitan city like Hong Kong, for many of their… – Continue reading
Where the United States leads on legislation, foreign jurisdictions slavishly follow Hongkongers will need to declare all their assets abroad by 2025. No, the government has not announced the policy yet. But academics have noticed a trend which strongly suggests Hong Kong will follow the US example in foreign tax… – Continue reading
The push for a tax amnesty has attracted a fair amount of criticism and even rebuke from analysts, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and even the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). Yustinus Prastowo, a respectable tax analyst, went so far as… – Continue reading
A 30% tax bracket. A rise in the standard rate, with a rebate for lower earners. Higher taxes all round to finance more spending. In Scotland, ahead of May’s elections for the devolved parliament, a fascinating debate on tax and spending is under way, with the main parties setting out… – Continue reading
If Swiss banking secrecy laws gave Switzerland the world banking capital status, Monaco’s residence policy gives its realtors a thriving business. What is common between the Canadian Raonic who lost in the Australian Open semifinals and the Serbian Djokovic who won it? Well, they are both residents of Monaco, and… – Continue reading
Just when you thought the banksters had done all they could to rig the game against people that bail them out, you hear another tale of industrial-strength greed. This time, the scam is so ironic it’s almost absurd. For almost a decade the U.S. government has been going around the… – Continue reading
Earlier this week the State Department released its latest statistics for people who have renounced their US citizenship. 2015 was another record year, with 4,279 people divorcing themselves from the US government and heading to greener pastures elsewhere. This was the third year in a row that broke the previous… – Continue reading
Taxing decisions With highly efficient labour markets, a solid institutional environment and a strong banking system, Canada has long been considered one of the most competitive nations in the world. In fact, in its most recent rankings in 2014, Bloomberg declared Canada the second best country in the world for… – Continue reading
The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB) is seeking to expedite the signing of Intergovernmental Agreements (IGA) that will prevent the loss of correspondent banking relationships (CBR) for commercial banks in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). Towards this end, Governor of the ECCB, Timothy NJ Antoine sought the assistance of… – Continue reading
Former Standard Chartered chief says eliminating €500, $100, SFr1,000 and £50 notes would prevent corrupt payments Governments should consider scrapping high denomination banknotes to combat financial crime and tax evasion, including paying tradespeople in cash, a former bank boss has said. Criminals move more than $2tn (£1.4tn) around the world… – Continue reading
Journalist Steve Topple investigates Bermuda-based big business tax avoidance and its links with UK political parties – and even some charities LAST WEEK saw the news emerge that everyone’s favourite search engine, Google, only had to pay £97m in back-tax (not the “major success” of £130m as was first reported)… – Continue reading
