Panama papers?

[chadr]

Tax avoidance is not legal when someone is paid to 'back date' documents, that is completely illegal period! Bring on the revolution, burn them at the stake, cut off their heads.......sorry lost it for a moment

regards

Dave

Again, that is Tax evasion - i.e. you have (illegally) reduced your tax liability, which in this case is backdating the tax avoidance scheme.

Had they not backdated it, the tax avoidance scheme would most probably have been perfectly legal.

Let's be honest about it, we all would like to reduce our tax liability* - I know I certainly would. However as I've been a PAYE tax payer for most, if not all of my working life, I do not have the options available to me that perhaps more diverse income sources might provide.


Add : * legally reduce my tax liability, I hasten to add!!!

 

[Shayne]

Mate of mine worked in a tax office (offshore) he went pretty high up the ladder before as a result of buying his third house one of his colleagues took interest in his finances .

Tax office took him to court where he admitted at the outset that he had never paid a penny tax and then proved to the satisfaction of the court that he had broken no laws .

They couldn't even sack him or reduce his pay , so decided instead to insult him making him work on the public counter . I bet that dumb decision cost them a damn sight more in the long run , I remember him tearing up my tax return form and asking me to sign another and leave it with him . I got a very nice rebate in place of the expected bill

We don't play pool any more and the last time i bumped into him a short hello was all we managed as he was getting into a Bentley with a bunch of other suits . I guess he quit his old job .

 

[Chas]

One does wonder at the timing of the discovery (i don't think anyone is genuinely shocked to learn of it) , with euro skepticism spreading at a phenomenal rate throughout Europe i wonder if our dictators have moved to plan B .

 

[Shayne]

Not the plan B i had in mind Chas i was thinking more along the lines of - we can make it go away mr CaMoron but unless you lick our boots we will hang you out to dry .

 

[clivehorridge]

I think you mean avoidance in both cases above. Tax avoidance is perfectly legal - though the morality of it, certainly at the Mossack Fonseca scale, is dubious at best. A large part of companies such as EY, KPMG etc business is to exploit tax loopholes for their (wealthy) clients in perfectly legal ways. It's just that the law is so complex and convoluted in this area, that you need an army of lawyers and accountants just to understand it.

Now we can debate the morality of these avoidance schemes till the cows come home, however as long as it is legal, then people will continue to use them. In principle it is no different to me or you stashing a few £ks away in an ISA.

It is the government(s) responsibility to change the tax rules and close down these loopholes, until such time people will continue to exploit them.

Tax evasion is illegal and a completely different argument.

I fully appreciate the distinction and your correction of my error.

In reality, it's avoidance by evasion and then the devil will be in the details of whether that evasion has been processed legally or not, which encompasses Shaynes valid point.

True, while its legal, it will be pursued. Illegal evasion will continue as before IMO....

 

[clivehorridge]

Note.... this is one law firm in one country. Imagine what the real scale of this is.

What ticks me off is that folks who need it the least are the ones who get away with it and the ones who also are the biggest tax resource users.

My understanding is that the investigations leading to the publishing of the Panama Papers originated from one lady journalist who then gained the trust of others in different countries, as her investigations took her to those countries. It ended up as a 100+ membership of journalists who agreed a pact of secrecy and non-disclosure, until the investigations were complete or at least of sufficient size to have an impact, and the process took about 1 year.

"The Panama Papers are an unprecedented leak of 11.5m files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ then shared them with a large network of international partners, including the Guardian and the BBC."

The above quote is from here....

 

[Pumpy]

What's remarkable about the ahem "leak" is the names and nationalities that are not implicated. Most of the finger pointing is guilt by association, lead by the lamestream meda, aimed at countries where the globalists want more control. Maybe the the oligarchs in the US, UK, Israel, Germany, and most NATO countires are squeaky clean

Just look at the orwellian styled name of the "The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists" who are clearly anything but when you look at their "suppoerters"

Recent ICIJ funders include: Adessium Foundation, Open Society Foundations, The Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Fritt Ord Foundation, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Ford Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts and Waterloo Foundation.
We are also very grateful for the support of the Australian philanthropist and businessman Graeme Wood.

A cynic might conclude the whole exercise is designed to further global destabilisation to benefit the globalists, and encourage the wealthy to move funds to a more secret tax haven where the globalists can wield their influence on the money much easier, say somewhere like Nevada USA.

 

[Rob Cowell]

What's remarkable about the ahem "leak" is the names and nationalities that are not implicated. Most of the finger pointing is guilt by association, lead by the lamestream meda, aimed at countries where the globalists want more control. Maybe the the oligarchs in the US, UK, Israel, Germany, and most NATO countires are squeaky clean

Just look at the orwellian styled name of the "The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists" who are clearly anything but when you look at their "suppoerters"

A cynic might conclude the whole exercise is designed to further global destabilisation to benefit the globalists, and encourage the wealthy to move funds to a more secret tax haven where the globalists can wield their influence on the money much easier, say somewhere like Nevada USA.

I'm intrigued by this, but I don't understand it.

What is wrong with the supporters of the ICIJ listed? Who are the key names and nationalities not being implicated? What countries would globalists like more control over?

 

[Crispin]

Pass me the tinfoil hat Pumpy. My turn to wear it.

I would like to see the real list. 2.6TB is a shed-load of data. Unless there were many movies in there too, I wonder what the un-redacted version contains

Stuff like this when is, as you say "leaked, it normally makes it into the wild where everyone can have a gander. This seems to be very targeted.
The last big one was Ashley Madison where Tony Bair's email address was obviously hacked in there

 

[GeekOKent]

I didn't think the data was actually available at all. Did someone publish it or put it on a torrent somewhere?

Bit of a story going aground how it was found in the first place.

 

[Shayne]

CaMoron's spin doctors have obviously told him to admit it now , lest we lose trust in him

 

[Crispin]

no torrent or pastebin AFAIK. It's only being released in drips and drabs by the "international press consortium". Or some such. I find it curious that more MPs and Lords have not been named. Really? We believe they all got Halifax savings accounts?

2.6TB was the dump. That's clearly a backup which was either sent from inside or downloaded. A company with that type of profile would (should?) have had top-notch IT setup and security. If hacked did their system allow 2.6TB of data to flow through it without alerting?

As with all these things - my money is on the media dropping it over the weekend. It'll be gone.

 

[GeekOKent]

https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/04/mossack-fonseca-breach-vulnerable-slider-revolution/

The back chatter on this is that a script kiddie found this site during a general ip trawl. Didn't know what they were looking at and sold the backdoor to someone really cheap. That person then some data, figured out that it could be a big deal and handed the data over for *nothing* to the journo cabal.

 

[GeekOKent]

If the data does become available people are going to start doing things like this : http://neo4j.com/blog/icij-hsbc-fraud-neo4j-linkurious/

 

[Rob Cowell]

If the data does become available people are going to start doing things like this : http://neo4j.com/blog/icij-hsbc-fraud-neo4j-linkurious/

I'm quite impressed by the forum software that chose to place an advert for O'Reilly Media's Graph Database book next to your post in my view. Considering the words Graph or Database aren't there. I'm sure Neo4J would include RDF tags in their HTML, but something has to follow the URL to find it

Or it could be randomly picked from my cookies.

 

[Crispin]

Or it could be randomly picked from my cookies.

Not me - google. The adverts are based on so many things about you and your browsing habits. It's also unlikely that they followed the URL but rather they already had all the data attributes from it from another time someone clicked on it.

They don't always get it right though I have an advert showing there now for Citroen services. I've never in my life owned one and have certainly not searched for one.

 

[Chris]

I work hard to earn money. The government takes half of that in takes and NI (Largely to pay for scroungers who don't work or are ill through their own making)
I put the rest in the bank who pays me a tiny fee to borrow it for a while. The government taxes me on that.
I take some out to buy something I need or want. The government takes 20% as a fee
I turn what I have bought into profit. The government takes some of that
I die and leave what's left to the family who gets a visit for another hand out.

If I could find a way to pay these bastards less than I have to, I'd bloody well take it so I would. I give away more than some people earn each month

 

[Lund]

I just paid £4000 to the bastards HMRC in taxes... a late self assessment I had no idea I had to do, just to realise I've had 0T as taxcode for last year... bastards!!!

Now I ask you this;

If 100% taxation is slavery--- at what % is it to be considered democrazy---let alone a free man?

Fuk'em, I managed to avoid the tax man for many many years working internationally, as I'm not interested to pay for all the cnuts in power, the junkies, the refugees, the lazy bastards...then I moved to this nice rainy country hand have half my shit stolen to pay for exactly thet... smart move eh...

 

[Chris]

Lund, sorry mate I have to protest at your use of language.


It does not rain here ALL the time. Ha Ha

 

[Lund]

Yes it does