Britain is the heart, soul of tax evasion

schild and UBS.

HSBC, recently fined $1.9bn for laundering the money of Mexico’s most violent drug cartels, used the Panamanian firm to create 2,300 offshore companies, whilst Coutts — the family bank of the Windsors — set up just under 500.

And, of course, David Cameron’s own father was named in the papers, having “helped create and develop” Blairmore Holdings, worth $20 million, from its inception in 1982 till his death in 2010. Blairmore, in which Cameron junior was also a shareholder, was registered in the Bahamas, and was specifically advertised to investors as a means of avoiding UK tax.

The Daily Mail noted that: “Even though he lived in London, the Prime Minister’s father would leave the country and fly to Switzerland or the Bahamas for board meetings of Blairmore Holdings — to ensure it would not have to pay UK income tax or corporation tax. He hired a small army of Bahamas residents, including a parttime bishop, to sign its paperwork — as part of another bid to show his firm was not British-based.”

That Britain should emerge as central to this scandal is no surprise. For as Nicholas Shaxson, a leading authority on tax havens put it when I interviewed him in 2011; “The City of London is effectively the grand-daddy of the global offshore system.” Whilst there are various different lists of tax havens in existence, depending on how exactly they are defined, on any one of them explains Shaxson, “you will see that about half of the tax havens on there, of the ones that matter, are in some way British or partly British.” Firstly, are “Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man: the crown dependencies. They’re very fundamentally controlled by Britain.” Then there are the Overseas Territories, such as the Caymans, Bermuda, and the Virgin Islands, in which “all the things that matter are effectively controlled by Great Britain.”

Of course, it suits the British government to portray all these territories as ‘autonomous’ or ‘self-governing’ in order to provide itself with plausible deniability about what they are doing. But the reality is they are run by a governor appointed by the Queen on the British government’s advice.

Casey Gill, one of the earliest lawyers specialising in offshore operations explained how legislation was devised in the Caymans: tax experts and accountants would fly in from all over the world “and say ‘these are the loopholes in our system’. And Caymans legislation would be designed accordingly,” often by a conglomerate run by Gill, before being sent to the British Foreign Office for approval. Shaxson asked Gill if Britain, who had the power to veto such legislation, ever raised any objections. “No,” he said, “Not ever. Never.”

The entire UK- controlled web is home to offshore deposits estimated in 2009 to be worth $3.2 trillion, 55 percent of the global total: equivalent to roughly $500 for every man, woman and child on the planet. — RT. more holistic and diverse look at engaging with the continent encompassing development assistance, investment opportunities and stronger political-security cooperation.

There are 49 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa through which Japan has been looking to enhance relationships with to gain support in international bodies such as the UN. Japan should also look to leverage this year’s Sixth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) — a very successful forum through which Japan has solidified its reputation in Africa.

But aside from UNSC reform and economic competition with China, there are other important drivers for stronger ties, including the growth of violent extremism in North and West Africa, highlighted by the sustained challenge of Boko Haram and al-Qaeda along with the more recent emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) in Libya.

There is also the threat of piracy around the Horn of Africa and Japan’s deployment of SDF in Djibouti to take part in a multilateral policing action there to mitigate those threats. Security issues in Africa are no longer strictly peripheral for Tokyo.

In sum, Japan’s strategic interests in Africa are diverse.

Despite this, Tokyo should not play the game of jostling and one-upmanship with China in Africa, but rather accentuate its strengths and continue the current diplomatic uptick which aligns with the continent’s growth in the coming years. — Al Jazeera.