|
This article is incomplete and has not been edited recently, and is considered abandoned. It is to be deleted 2 days after this notice was added (See history for date of addition), if work on it does not resume. Please edit it so it becomes un-abandoned. If you feel that this article is ready to be published, please add {{review}} to it. |
| This article is incomplete and has not been edited recently, and is considered abandoned. It is to be deleted 2 days after this notice was added (See history for date of addition), if work on it does not resume. Please edit it so it becomes un-abandoned. If you feel that this article is ready to be published, please add {{review}} to it. |
|
The validity of this article as a news story is, as written, disputed. Wikinews does not publish reports on events that are not sufficiently recent. For synthesis, new details must have come to light within the past two or three days, and the news event itself must have happened within a week. Unless sources can be found and a news event chosen to bring this article into compliance with those requirements, the article may be deleted. If any new details from the last two to three days are newsworthy in their own right then an article could be written with these updates as the actual news event. Exceptions are possible where original reporting adds significant new and newsworthy information to the article.
Please try to resolve objections on the discussion page, or move the article to Wikipedia or another sister project where it may be more relevant. |
| The validity of this article as a news story is, as written, disputed. Wikinews does not publish reports on events that are not sufficiently recent. For synthesis, new details must have come to light within the past two or three days, and the news event itself must have happened within a week. Unless sources can be found and a news event chosen to bring this article into compliance with those requirements, the article may be deleted.
If any new details from the last two to three days are newsworthy in their own right then an article could be written with these updates as the actual news event. Exceptions are possible where original reporting adds significant new and newsworthy information to the article.
Please try to resolve objections on the discussion page, or move the article to Wikipedia or another sister project where it may be more relevant. |
This article is under development. You are welcome to contribute to it.If it is ready to be reviewed and fact-checked, Submit for review?Template:Assistant/submit/formSubmit for review by changing the {{develop}} tag to {{review}} |
This article is under development. You are welcome to contribute to it.If it is ready to be reviewed and fact-checked, Submit for review?Template:Assistant/submit/formSubmit for review by changing the {{develop}} tag to {{review}} |
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt was DAY implicated in the ongoing Paradise Papers scandal.
From 2010 to 2016, Verhofstadt served on the board of a shipping business called Exmar, which may have used one of the companies mentioned in the Paradise Papers to avoid paying taxes.
In findings made available to the public on Sunday, November 5, a group of 381 journalists released the Paradise Papers, a collection of about 13.4 million records in 1.5 terabytes of data going back to 1950, detailing how law firms and other agencies helped wealthy individuals and companies move assets to places like Shanghai, Trinidad, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands, to avoid taxes, regulation or both. Clients cited in the Paradise Papers include companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Apple, Inc., and individual people such as members of both major United States political parties, three former Canadian prime ministers, and Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.
The Paradise Papers include emails, loan agreements and other records affecting people in 180 countries. More than half of the records—6.8 million in all—are from the law firm Appleby, part of which is now known as Estera. The largest number of individual entities—people and corporations—from the Appleby portion of the Paradise Papers are located in the United States, at 31,000, but there were also over 3,000 from Canada.
The documents were originally acquired by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, who shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ coordinated journalists in 67 countries in investigating the documents.
Most of the techniques used by Appleby and other firms are legal, and some can be illegal depending on how they are executed. The revelation of the papers has raised questions about ethics. Süddeutsche Zeitung concluded wealthy individuals were using these tax shelters to avoid regulations, sanctions, taxes and social responsibility. The ICIJ stated, “There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. We do not intend to suggest or imply that any people, companies or other entities included in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly.”
Brooke Harrington of the Copenhagen Business School says tax shelters exacerbate inequality. “There is this small group of people who are not equally subject to the laws as the rest of us, and that’s on purpose,” she said. “When the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, because individual wealthy people are not paying their fair share of taxes.” She went on to call the situation “French Revolution levels of inequality and injustice.”
Appleby issued a statement in response to the documents’ release: “The journalists do not allege, nor could they, that Appleby has done anything unlawful. There is no wrongdoing. It is a patchwork quilt of unrelated allegations with a clear political agenda and movement against offshore.” Instead, they referred to the leak itself as “a serious criminal act. This was an illegal computer hack.”
Wilbur Ross, who serves as Secretary of Commerce under U.S. President Donald Trump, was found to own part of a shipping company that had dealings with a Russian energy firm partially owned by Vladimir Putin’s son in law, to the tune of US$68 million.
According to the BBC, Queen Elizabeth II held about ?10 million (US$13 million) offshore, though the ICIJ reported she “voluntarily pays tax on income received.”
Facebook and Twitter both received hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in the form of investments through two Russian organizations that are, according to Reveal, “known as vehicles for the Kremlin’s politically sensitive dealings.” National Public Radio mentions this may have implications for the investigation of Russian involvement in last year’s U.S. presidential election, which remains ongoing.
The papers also tell how the technology company Apple, Inc. moved from Ireland to the island of Jersey after a shift in regulatory policy. According to The New York Times, “Apple has accumulated more than US$128 billion in profits offshore, and probably much more, that is untaxed by the United States and hardly touched by any other country. Nearly all of that was generated over the past decade.”
The Paradise Papers also detail some of the techniques that firms would use to move their clients’ assets. For example, firms create shell companies—companies with no employees—located in the Cayman Islands or other tax-favorable jurisdictions, and award them ownership of assets that do not take up physical space.