Ashcroft banks at centre of major US tax evasion probe
TWO banks owned by former Tory Party vicechairman Lord Ashcroft are at the centre of a major US tax evasion investigation.
Authorities are probing whether wealthy Americans have been using the banks, based in the Central American tax haven Belize, to shelter funds offshore.
Billionaire Lord Ashcroft is the majority shareholder of BCB Holdings, which owns Belize Bank International Ltd and Belize Bank Ltd. The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) served a summons last month to retrieve information on US taxpayers who hold accounts at the banks, with the Department of Justice warning them: ‘The time to come clean is now – before we knock on your door.’
The court order also gave the IRS permission to seek records of Belize Bank International Ltd and Belize Bank Ltd’s correspondent accounts, maintained on their behalf by Bank of America and Citibank in the US.
The investigation centres on Americans holding offshore bank accounts between December 2006 and December 2014, who the authorities believe may have used the accounts to evade US taxes.
There is no suggestion the Belizean banks have done anything improper. Lord Ashcroft has a 74.8 per cent stake in BCB Holdings Ltd. According to his website he was a director until May 2011.
However, a spokesman for Lord Ashcroft said the peer currently had no ‘material’ involvement with the banks.
‘Lord Ashcroft is not connected in any material way with this matter. He has had no operational role with BCB’s banks in Belize for about 15 years. And he is neither a Director nor Officer of BCB Holdings Ltd, the parent company, having… retired as a Director more than four years ago. He thus has no supervisory role either,’ the spokesman said.
Ashcroft has faced criticism in the past over tax. In 2010 he was forced to give up his non-dom tax status in order to keep his seat in the House of Lords. Last month a serialisation of a book co-authored by Lord Ashcroft claimed that the Prime Minister was aware in 2009 that he was a ‘non-dom.’