The central government is stepping up its anti-graft drive by cracking down on illegal lending and money-laundering operations in a bid to prevent outbound flows of stolen assets. The Ministry of Public Security says “black banks” and illegal currency exchanges have facilitated the flights of a number of former government… – Continue reading
No focus on stock markets and other money-laundering machines After all the noisy assertions, only Rs4,147 crore of unaccounted wealth was declared during the special 90-day compliance window of the The Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets (Imposition of Tax) Act, 2015 (Black Money Bill). Of this, just Rs2,488 crore will… – Continue reading
Both internal and external factors threaten politics, economics Hong Kong’s run of good luck is running out. One obvious sign is the increasing interference of Beijing in its domestic affairs, most recently using tame Chief Executive C.Y. Leung and a clique of yes-men to interfere in a senior academic appointment… – Continue reading
A former head of Australia’s anti-money-laundering agency wants tough rules introduced to prevent the country from becoming a safe haven for foreign corrupt funds. Despite credible warnings that large volumes of illicit money leaving China are being laundered in Australia, an investigation by ABC programme Four Corners has found no… – Continue reading
(CNS Business): Government faces some serious challenges over the next 18 months to update the regulatory regime that protects the country’s financial service sector ahead of a task force inspection in March 2017. Francis Arana, head of the Anti-Money Laundering Unit in the Attorney General’s Chambers, who is coordinating the… – Continue reading
Fenergo, the leading provider of Client Lifecycle Management solutions for institutional banks, has today published key findings from new research commissioned from the Aite Group which suggests that financial institutions are struggling to manage regulatory compliance and entity data management obligations across multiple jurisdictions. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20150114/724322) The research finds that… – Continue reading
In 2016, hundreds of directors, managers, principal points of contact (PPCs), compliance officers, administrators, and Money Laundering Reporting Officers (MLROs) serving Cayman Islands funds, banks, trust companies and other Reporting Financial Institutions (RFIs) will start to feel the full force of ‘a great wind’: global tax transparency. If you are… – Continue reading
LONDON: Creating a more participatory approach to tax co-operation tops the agenda of this year’s meeting of Commonwealth finance ministers in Lima on October 7. Delegates will discuss the need for developing countries to be more active in global negotiations to prevent international tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion. The… – Continue reading
Colombia and Panama have given each other another 60 days to come to agreement on how to combat Colombian tax evasion through Panamanian banks. The two countries failed to meet the negotiation deadline set for the exchange of tax information after one year, extending a further 60 days, in a… – Continue reading
Government’s anti-corruption champion says legislation is one option if British overseas territories fail to adopt public registers of companies The government could legislate to force the UK’s tax havens to reveal for the first time the true owners of offshore companies, anti-corruption champion Sir Eric Pickles has indicated. Pickles described… – Continue reading
The four entities tasked with upholding New Zealand’s anti-money laundering law should team up to close off the law’s obvious arbitrage opportunity by stopping financial services companies that only have clients overseas from being able to sidestep the law, a leading lawyer says. As first highlighted by interest.co.nz in August… – Continue reading
Prime minister says he is still not happy with way some British overseas territories are resisting financial transparency, reports The Guardian. David Cameron has accused some British overseas territories and crown dependencies of not doing enough to tackle tax evasion and money laundering. The prime minister took the offshore financial… – Continue reading
SOUTH Africa has ranked higher than several developed countries in an assessment of money “hidden” in HSBC Swiss bank accounts, a report showed on Wednesday. “The money connected to SA was higher than money connected to France, eight times higher than that of the US, and 3.5 times more than… – Continue reading
HUNDREDS of properties worth more than £300 million in Brighton and Hove are owned by firms based in off-shore tax havens. Care homes, pubs, supermarkets, doctors’ surgeries, petrol stations and shops are all among almost 300 properties owned by firms based in foreign climes with beneficial tax arrangements. Millions of… – Continue reading
New Delhi, October 1 India recovered a meagre $575 million of unreported funds under a tax amnesty scheme that offered a chance to citizens to disclose overseas assets by paying tax and a penalty, raising doubts over a campaign against tax offenders. Only 638 people declared assets under the tax… – Continue reading
A stream of people, including those from Rajasthan and Karnataka, walked into the only designated office before the closure of the one-time compliance window The Centre’s efforts to unearth unaccounted money stashed abroad seems to have got a tepid response, with the declarations made under the three-month compliance window that… – Continue reading
The Guernsey Association of Compliance Officers (GACO) chair, Mark Dunster, has urged those affected by the introduction of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), and other exchange of information regimes, to attend a free seminar hosted by the association next Monday. Guernsey Income Tax office compliance and international manager,… – Continue reading
The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, passed in 2010, is a tool devised to help the U.S. locate funds of U.S. citizens being held in foreign banks. (See this earlier FATCA report on LBN). The law requires foreign banks to report data about accounts owned by U.S. citizens to the… – Continue reading
Entebbe — Members of African Parliamentarian Network on Illicit Financial Flows and Tax (APNIFFT) want governments across the continent to put more pressure on multinational companies to pay full taxes. According to the parliamentarians, tax evasion and illicit financial flow (IFFs) from Africa can be brought to an end if… – Continue reading
New Delhi, Sept 22 (KNN) Government will not extend the window for declaration of black money assets held abroad beyond September 30, said Joint Secretary, Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), Ministry of Finance, V Anandarajan. While inaugurating the conference on ‘Black Money Act: Ignorance is not Bliss! – Key… – Continue reading
A former financial services minister yesterday branded as “inconsequential” concerns over the District of Columbia’s (DC) pending ‘tax haven’ blacklisting of the Bahamas and 16 other Caribbean nations. Ryan Pinder, now a senior executive at Deltec Bank & Trust, was responding to concerns raised by Opposition finance spokesman, K Peter… – Continue reading
For years it has been the currency of the Costa, as criminals simply can’t do business without a bag of ‘black money’. Judges, solicitors and local councils have been prone to their cut on every transaction and complex property transfer for decades. However, now the Spanish are finally cracking down… – Continue reading
NEW DELHI: Widening its probe into suspected tax evasion and laundering of black money through stock markets, regulator Sebi is looking into illicit ‘arbitrage’ through derivatives trading from offshore locations. Also under the scanner are manipulation through ‘client code modifications’ in the past, although there has been a complete clampdown… – Continue reading
“Luxembourg is famous for two things: its steel industry and its rose cultivation industry”. This quote from an Italian guidebook of the 1930s was uttered by Luxembourg’s Finance Minister Pierre Gramegna at the annual conference of the Luxembourg Directors’ Association on 17 June 2015[1]. The economic outlook of the tiny… – Continue reading
Is Xi Jinping (習近平)’s anti-corruption campaign crushing it or embarrassingly ineffective? You make the call. It was widely reported the year before Xi assumed office that upwards of 18,000 corrupt officials had fled China since 1990 with about US$120 billion. In early 2012, the Ministry of Supervision released figures saying… – Continue reading
Indonesians hold $300 billion in Singapore; controversial tax amnesty on the cards. Indonesia’s finance minister Bambang Brodjonegoro told Euromoney earlier this year that tax collection falls way short of targets and must improve to provide funding for infrastructure and other projects It doesn’t take much for Indonesia’s government officials to… – Continue reading
Lawyer Patrick Poulin says he helped clients set up offshore corporations in the Caribbean. And that’s what he was working on when he flew to Miami from the Turks and Caicos last year to meet with two Americans who wanted him to invest $2 million from a real estate deal…. – Continue reading
Two reviews into the Ontario Provincial Police Association reveal that “tyrannical” leaders led to a complete breakdown of governance. There were harassing, expletive-filled emails, including one telling a staffer to “hurry the f— up” and another threatening to “rip off” a board member’s head. There were employees brought to tears… – Continue reading
Washington State Auditor Troy Kelley faces additional charges of money laundering and tax evasion. The U.S. Attorney’s office announced the new charges Thursday afternoon. The charges are contained in a superseding indictment against Kelley. The first-term Democrat now faces a total of 17 federal charges, including five new counts of… – Continue reading
HSBC’s Argentine unit told to remove CEO and one director HSBC accused of helping capital flight by wealthy Argentines Argentina’s central bank revoked the licenses of two top executives at HSBC Holdings Plc’s local unit, including the chief executive officer, arguing they had failed to prevent clients from laundering funds… – Continue reading
HSBC Argentina has been asked to appoint a new president and vice president within 24 hours by Argentina’s central bank for failing to prevent tax evasion and money laundering. Last year, HSBC was charged for helping more than 4,000 clients evade taxes by hiding their money in secret Swiss bank… – Continue reading
New Delhi: Expressing concerns over the outflow of funds from developing countries, including India, through money laundering and other ways, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha today said as much as $300-600 billion moves out through such channels. “Illicit financial flows means the money that actually is black money,… – Continue reading
US fund managers and other investment advisers would have to take steps to combat money laundering and report suspicious transactions to authorities under a long-awaited US Treasury rule proposed on Tuesday, reports Reuters. If made final the proposal by Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) would close a long-standing hole… – Continue reading
The most controversial part of the Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (4th AMLD) is probably going to be the Register of Beneficial Ownership. The controversy arises since certain information which is considered private and which legitimately could be kept as such, will now be made available to a number of persons… – Continue reading
Money laundering experts say there is no way for Canadians to know how much dirty money is being laundered in Vancouver real estate through Canadian lawyers. As a Province investigation revealed Monday, Canada’s financial intelligence unit Fintrac has ramped up an audit of Vancouver’s booming property market because of concerns… – Continue reading
In an assessment of money laundering and terrorism financing risks, Luxembourg scored in the bottom half of a ranking of 152 countries carried out by the Basel Institute on Governance, reports the Luxemburger Wort. The institute says that its AML (Anti-Money Laundering) Index is the only such review carried out… – Continue reading
Aug 24 (Reuters) – Switzerland expects to adopt a new law by the end of the year that will speed restitution of illicit funds stashed in the Alpine country, where thousands of ‘politically exposed persons’ are believed to hold bank accounts, a top Swiss official said on Monday. Swiss authorities… – Continue reading
Investigator says Canadian real estate market has developed reputation as a place to launder money A report prepared for Canada’s anti-money laundering watchdog points to offshore cash in the real estate sector as a “significant risk” for criminal wrongdoing. The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, commonly known… – Continue reading
Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) has entered into partnership with the continent tax bodies in a move to wipe out illicit financial flows from Africa. A report on illicit financial flows (IFFs) estimates that Uganda loses at least Shs1.5 trillion every year to illegal activities perpetrated by the multinational companies. The… – Continue reading
MUMBAI: As it steps up its crackdown on tax evasion and laundering of black money through stock markets, regulator Sebi has busted an ‘innovative’ scheme wherein HNIs were incurring ‘bogus losses’ to offset tax liabilities. The probe, which has resulted in an interim ban on 59 entities, including HNIs and… – Continue reading
FOCUS: The UK government plans a new criminal offence for companies and partnerships whose ‘agents’ facilitate the evasion of UK tax. The proposal is to make corporations criminally responsible if they fail to take reasonable steps to prevent their agents from taking actions that facilitate tax evasion. Agents include employees… – Continue reading
American residents or nationals, citizens and green card holders – persons of interest – living in Jamaica are required to file US tax returns and must, by voluntary disclosure, fill out a form to disclose ‘foreign assets’. The filing of a Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts Report (FBAR) is an… – Continue reading
Many have, mistakenly, confused the prime minister (PM)’s recent remark that Rs 6,500 crore had been disclosed by holders of hitherto unaccounted money with disclosures under the compliance window in the recent law on the subject. However, this money has nothing to do with the latter’s three-month window. These came… – Continue reading
ISLAMABAD: In a bid to persuade legislators to withdraw their opposition, the government on Wednesday hinted at reviewing the Rs10 million limit that it proposed for treating tax evasion as an offence under Anti-Money Laundering Act. The government showed this flexibility during a meeting of Senate Standing Committee on Finance and… – Continue reading
The following article by Dr Monica Galea John, partner in the Financial Services Department, analyses the manner in which the Fourth EU Anti Money Laundering Directive (the “Directive“) which has just made its way through the EU’s legislation, obliges, for the first time, EU member states to maintain central registers… – Continue reading
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network will soon propose new rules that may require investment advisers to establish and implement written anti-money laundering programs designed to prevent advisory clients from using advisers to launder funds or perpetrate other criminal activities. The rules also may require advisers to report… – Continue reading
New data from Juniper Research has found that more than one in 10 adults worldwide will engage in some form of mobile or online gambling by 2019, with nearly half of adults in UK and Italian markets playing by that time. While to some extent the finding can be attributed… – Continue reading
The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) is putting in place a series of measures to prevent use of its exchange platform by various unscrupulous entities to evade taxes and launder money. These measures include putting additional circuit filters on stocks that are susceptible for price manipulation and reducing the number of… – Continue reading
A CAMPAIGN questioning the “fairness” of land ownership launched across Scotland yesterday. Our Land is a month-long initiative created by Common Weal, Women for Independence and land reform campaigners Andy Wightman and Lesley Riddoch and aims to highlight problems caused by a land ownership system that “allows a handful of… – Continue reading
High net worth individuals seen using illiquid stocks in options segment to evade taxes, manipulate markets; order likely soon The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is likely to act against several wealthy investors, for alleged manipulation of the stock exchange route for evading taxes. Sources said the market… – Continue reading
