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Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% From Panama Leak 62

3 Apr, 2016 in Uncategorized by craig | View Comments
Whoever leaked the Mossack Fonseca papers appears motivated by a genuine desire to expose the system that enables the ultra wealthy to hide their massive stashes, often corruptly obtained and all involved in tax avoidance. These Panamanian lawyers hide the wealth of a significant proportion of the 1%, and the massive leak of their documents ought to be a wonderful thing.
Unfortunately the leaker has made the dreadful mistake of turning to the western corporate media to publicise the results. In consequence the first major story, published today by the Guardian, is all about Vladimir Putin and a cellist on the fiddle. As it happens I believe the story and have no doubt Putin is bent.
But why focus on Russia? Russian wealth is only a tiny minority of the money hidden away with the aid of Mossack Fonseca. In fact, it soon becomes obvious that the selective reporting is going to stink.
The Suddeutsche Zeitung, which received the leak, gives a detailed explanation of the methodology the corporate media used to search the files. The main search they have done is for names associated with breaking UN sanctions regimes. The Guardian reports this too and helpfully lists those countries as Zimbabwe, North Korea, Russia and Syria. The filtering of this Mossack Fonseca information by the corporate media follows a direct western governmental agenda. There is no mention at all of use of Mossack Fonseca by massive western corporations or western billionaires the main customers. And the Guardian is quick to reassure that "much of the leaked material will remain private."
What do you expect? The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named "International Consortium of Investigative Journalists", which is funded and organised entirely by the USA's Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include
Ford Foundation
Carnegie Endowment
Rockefeller Family Fund
W K Kellogg Foundation
Open Society Foundation (Soros)
among many others. Do not expect a genuine expose of western capitalism. The dirty secrets of western corporations will remain unpublished.
Expect hits at Russia, Iran and Syria and some tiny "balancing" western country like Iceland. A superannuated UK peer or two will be sacrificed someone already with dementia.
The corporate media the Guardian and BBC in the UK have exclusive access to the database which you and I cannot see. They are protecting themselves from even seeing western corporations' sensitive information by only looking at those documents which are brought up by specific searches such as UN sanctions busters. Never forget the Guardian smashed its copies of the Snowden files on the instruction of MI6.
What if they did Mossack Fonseca database searches on the owners of all the corporate media and their companies, and all the editors and senior corporate media journalists? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on all the most senior people at the BBC? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on every donor to the Center for Public Integrity and their companies?

What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on every listed company in the western stock exchanges, and on every western millionaire they could trace?
That would be much more interesting. I know Russia and China are corrupt, you don't have to tell me that. What if you look at things that we might, here in the west, be able to rise up and do something about?
And what if you corporate lapdogs let the people see the actual data?

Quote: Iceland's prime minister is this week expected to face calls in parliament for a snap election after the Panama Papers revealed he is among several leading politicians around the world with links to secretive companies in offshore tax havens.
The financial affairs of Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson and his wife have come under scrutiny because of details revealed in documents from a Panamanian law firm that helps clients protect their wealth in secretive offshore tax regimes. The files from Mossack Fonseca form the biggest ever data leak to journalists.
Opposition leaders have this weekend been discussing a motion calling for a general election in effect a confidence vote in the prime minister.
On Monday, Gunnlaugsson is expected to face allegations from opponents that he has hidden a major financial conflict of interest from voters ever since he was elected an MP seven years ago.
The former prime minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir said Gunnlaugsson would have to resign if he could not regain public trust quickly, calling on him to "give a straightforward account of all the facts of the matter".
The former finance minister Steingrímur Sigfússon told the Guardian: "We can't permit this. Iceland would simply look like a banana republic. No one is saying he used his position as prime minister to help this offshore company, but the fact is you shouldn't leave yourself open to a conflict of interest. And nor should you keep it secret."
Leaked papers show Gunnlaugsson co-owned a company called Wintris Inc, set up in 2007 on the Caribbean island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, to hold investments with his wealthy partner, later wife, Anna Sigurlaug Pálsdóttir.
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The Caribbean island of Tortola, where Wintris was set up. Photograph: Christian Wheatley/Getty Images The couple were living in the UK at the time and had been advised to set up a company in the tax haven in order to hold and invest substantial proceeds from the sale of Pálsdóttir's share in her family's business back in Iceland.
Gunnlaugsson owned a 50% stake in Wintris for more than two years, then transferred it to Pálsdóttir, who held the other 50%, for one dollar. The prime minister's office now says his shareholding was an error and "it had always been clear to both of them that the prime minister's wife owned the assets". Once drawn to the couple's attention in late 2009, the error was corrected.
Towards the end of Gunnlaugsson's time as a Wintris shareholder, having returned to Iceland, he was elected to parliament as leader of the Progressive party.
Gunnlaugsson, who became prime minister four years later, never disclosed his Wintris shares on Iceland's parliamentary register of MPs' financial interests.
Nor has he spoken about the offshore company publicly until questioned by the Guardian and other media working in conjunction with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
When first asked if he had ever owned an offshore company, Gunnlaugsson said: "Myself? No. Well, the Icelandic companies I have worked with had connections with offshore companies … but I can confirm I have never hidden any of my assets."
Asked what he knew about Wintris, he initially said: "Well, it's a company, if I recall correctly, which is associated with one of the companies that I was on the board of." Shortly afterwards, Gunnlaugsson ended the interview.

Public statements

The prime minister and his wife then rushed out separate public statements in Icelandic condemning reporters' intrusions into their private business matters.
Both stressed their financial interests had always been properly disclosed to the Icelandic tax authorities. The Guardian has seen no evidence to suggest tax avoidance, evasion or any dishonest financial gain on the part of Gunnlaugsson, Pálsdóttir or Wintris.
The prime minister now accepts he did jointly own Wintris with his wife. Copies of the share certificate in his name and of Wintris's share register are published today by the Guardian.
He nevertheless insists he did not have to declare his shares on the parliamentary register because Wintris was a holding company, not a "commercial company".
He was elected to parliament in April 2009 and did not transfer his Wintris shares to Pálsdóttir until the last day of that year. A copy of the transfer agreement is published here.
Asked if he had nevertheless breached the spirit of the disclosure rules, the prime minister declined to reply. He conceded there might be a case for tightening the rulebook.
Leaked Wintris documents show in detail the layers of complexity associated with such BVI companies, masking the identity of those in charge.
They also raise uncomfortable questions about how Gunnlaugsson could have remained unaware for more than two years that he was the owner of 50% of Wintris and its considerable investments.
The instruction to set up Wintris first came through agents in Luxembourg, who contacted Mossack Fonseca, an international law firm specialising in offshore secrecy. A registered office was set up in the BVI and three nominee directors recruited from Panama.

Power of attorney

Names of the Panamanian directors appear on almost all of the company's official paperwork for the first three years, but it was Gunnlaugsson and Pálsdóttir who held the authority to control the firm, having privately been granted power of attorney over Wintris's affairs.
Five months after it was set up, the company also made arrangements to open a bank account at a London branch of Credit Suisse. By then, the involvement of Gunnlaugsson and Pálsdóttir in the activities of Wintris was well hidden from the public gaze.
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A woman leaves a branch of Iceland's second largest bank, Landsbanki, in October 2008, a day after the state officially announced it had nationalised it. Photograph: Olivier Morin/AFP/Getty Images Later that year, Iceland became one of the most severe casualties of the global credit crisis. Financial meltdown meant the country was forced to seek bailout loans and impose currency controls as foreign investors rushed to sell out of the rapidly devaluing Icelandic króna.
While Wintris was shielded from some of this turmoil, it had invested in bonds issued by three Icelandic banks and was owed more than 500m Icelandic króna (£2.8m) when they all collapsed. Only a small fraction of that sum is likely to be recovered.
Revelations from the Panama Papers about Gunnlaugsson and Pálsdóttir's offshore activities are awkward for Iceland's prime minister, who has made a name for himself defending the collapse of his country's financial system against the demands of foreign creditors, whom he has repeatedly characterised as "vultures".
He has dismissed suggestions that his wife's ownership of Wintris compromised him as prime minister. On the contrary, he suggested, his consistently tough approach to foreign creditors, including Wintris, demonstrated that his wife's financial interests had never affected his decision-making.

Icelanders' suspicions

For some years many ordinary Icelanders have grown suspicious about wealthy Icelanders and their use of offshore companies, concerned such arrangements are designed to avoid tax.
To pursue investigations in this area, Iceland's tax office last year paid a whistleblower for a cache of data from Mossack Fonseca's regional office in Luxembourg. As a result, tax inspectors are said to have in their hands the private details of up to 400 Icelanders with interests in tax havens.
There is no suggestion of tax avoidance in the case of Wintris, but the prime minister said he and his wife had "always assumed" the whistleblower data could include information on Wintris. He said he supported the tax office's ongoing inquiries.
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Iceland's finance minister, Bjarni Benediktsson. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images A rebellion against the prime minister in parliament on Monday may depend in part on the position taken by his partners in coalition government, led by the finance minister, Bjarni Benediktsson.
But Benediktsson's name also appears in the Panama Papers as he previously owned a third of a company called Falson & Co, incorporated in the Seychelles. Benediktsson's interest in Falson was held through bearer share certificates, which do not record the name of the owner.
He told the Guardian the company had been set up with two co-investors to buy a property in Dubai, but the deal had fallen through in 2009 and he had had no dealings with the company since.
In a television interview last year, Benediktsson was asked if he had ever done business in tax havens. "No, I haven't done that," he said. "I have not had any assets in tax havens not done anything like that."
Asked why he had not mentioned Falson, Benediktsson said he had not realised it was based in the Seychelles. He had thought it was in Luxembourg.
Panama Papers reporting team: Juliette Garside, Luke Harding, Holly Watt, David Pegg, Helena Bengtsson, Simon Bowers, Owen Gibson and Nick Hopkins
Video here

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HSBC's Money Laundering Nightmare (1): Mossack Fonseca

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Richard Smith
HSBC's CEO Stuart Gulliver and Chairman Douglas Flint put in an appearance in front of the Treasury Select Committee on Wednesday 25th February. As usual with these banker-bashing shindigs, the session was tense, with plenty of pointed questions and tortured responses that one could spend weeks parsing.
The one question that really made me prick up my ears was one from the very ferocious John Mann, MP. It's around 15:51:00 in the session video (slow to load), and it goes like this:

Mann: …Mr Gulliver, quick one: just whether, with your Panamanian setup, whether Mossack Fonseca was involved, directly or Indirectly?
Gulliver: I have no idea, and actually, that structure no longer exists.

Casually saying "I have no idea", to John Mann, on this particular subject, might turn out not to have been all that clever.
To understand why, we need, for a start, some more detail on this "Panamanian setup", for instance, from Bloomberg:

(Bloomberg) The decision by Stuart Gulliver, the chief executive officer of HSBC Holdings Plc, to park money in Switzerland through a Panamanian company puzzled lawyers who didn't see a clear tax benefit from the move.
Gulliver said he set up the account with HSBC's Swiss unit while living and working in Hong Kong for reasons of confidentiality, so that colleagues wouldn't be able to see how much he earned. He told reporters on a conference call Monday that he closed that account in 2009.

The confidentiality argument makes sense, kind of,

"A Swiss account held in the name of a Panamanian company was not an uncommon structure for some wealthy individuals," said Mark Summers, a Geneva-based lawyer with the firm of Charles Russell Speechlys. "In this case, it doesn't look like a structure that a Hong Kong resident, or U.K. non-domiciled resident would have needed. There isn't an obvious tax advantage."

…but…

Gulliver, 55, could have chosen less complicated ways of depositing his earnings discreetly, lawyers said.
Choosing another bank would have prevented colleagues from prying into his compensation. Moreover, Swiss financial secrecy laws would have prohibited any of the country's banks from sharing account data without his permission or a formal legal procedure. Any Swiss banker doing so risks a prison sentence.

Gulliver, located in Hong Kong and serving as Head of Treasury and Capital Markets in Asia-Pacific in 1998, when this structure was set up, explains it thus:

"Being in Switzerland protects me from the Hong Kong staff," he said. "Having a Panamanian company protects me from the Swiss staff because people are interested in what their colleagues are paid. Why is it Panamanian? That's the structure that the private bank was putting people into in those days."

To sum up, tendentiously: in HSBCworld, back in 1998, or earlier, and from then on, until 2009, at least, it was possible to set up bank accounts in such a way that no-one really knew what was going on: not the Swiss staff (nor directors), nor the Hong Kong staff, nor, necessarily, the main board of HSBC, either. Obviously in the particular case of Gulliver, someone would have known where to credit Gulliver's bonus, but in general, HSBC would have been putting a lot of trust in the folk out in the offshore subsidiaries. So what, then, of any other accounts routinely set up in the same sort of way, according to Gulliver himself, between, say, the mid-90s (or even earlier) and 2009, when Gulliver closed the account (or even later)? Are there any lurking horrors there, perchance?
Here's one more detail:

Gulliver's account was set up in the name of Panama-registered Worcester Equities Ltd., The Guardian reported.

Here are Worcester Equities' particulars, from the Panama register, via OpenCorporates. Evidently John Mann, MP, is better-briefed about Mossack Fonseca's involvement than Stuart Gulliver:

As you can see, this is as opaque as it gets: not a single one of the company officers is an identifiable human being.
The differences between Gulliver's account and the facts portrayed by OpenCorporates prompt further questions.
First, the company was incorporated in 2000, not 1998, and a quick check of the official Panama registry

confirms that OpenCorporates does have the date right. So, if neither OpenCorporates nor Stuart Gulliver's memory is playing tricks, what was the Gulliver arrangement between 1998 and 2000?
Second, if, as Gulliver affirmed before the Treasury Select Committee "that structure no longer exists", why is the company still live, five years later? Where are its bank accounts now, and who is operating them?
That's a question for Mossack Fonseca, of which Gulliver, evidently, has "no idea". That idealessness matters a lot already, and will soon matter more.
For an inkling of why it matters already, let's examine some claims made in a December 2014 investigative article at vice.com by Ken Silverstein.
The article is about Mossack Fonseca, and, discouragingly for the oblivious Stuart Gulliver, it is headlined The Law Firm That Works with Oligarchs, Money Launderers, and Dictators. It is unreferenced, but in almost all cases it turns out to be very easy to back-fit confirmation or corroboration from public sources. So I reckon Silverstein's done all the legwork he says he's done, and simply stripped out the references for his long Vice piece. I'll skip the bits I couldn't stand up; what's left is unnerving enough. First, there's the frame:

One purpose of a so-called shell company is that the money put in it can't be traced to its owner. Say, for example, you're a dictator who wants to finance terrorism, take a bribe, or pilfer your nation's treasury. A shell company is a bogus entity that allows you to hold and move cash under a corporate name without international law enforcement or tax authorities knowing it's yours. Once the money is disguised as the assets of this enterprisewhich would typically be set up by a trusted lawyer or crony in an offshore secrecy haven to further obscure ownershipyou can spend it or use it for new nefarious purposes. This is the very definition of money launderingtaking dirty money and making it cleanand shell companies make it possible. They're "getaway vehicles," says former US Customs investigator Keith Prager, "for bank robbers."

Then there's Rami Makhlouf:

Sometimes, however, international investigators are able to follow the money. Take the case of Rami Makhlouf, the richest and most powerful businessman in Syria. Makhlouf is widely believed to be the "bagman"a person who collects and manages ill-gotten lootfor President Bashar al Assad, who during the past three years has helped cause the deaths of more than 200,000 of his citizens in the country's civil war.
…
If Makhlouf was a bank robber, his getaway car was a company called Drex Technologies SA. In July 2012, the Treasury Department identified Drexa dummy entity with a British Virgin Islands addressas the corporate vehicle Makhlouf secretly controlled and used "to facilitate and manage his international financial holdings." In other words, say Makhlouf had skimmed a few million dollars off the top of a secret business deal with a crooked Syrian official. He wouldn't put it into a bank account that he could be linked to; instead, he'd funnel it through Drex so the money couldn't be connected to him.

Silverstein claims that the agent who incorporated this BVI company was Mossack Fonseca. He's right. Here's an official EU sanctions list. Scroll down and down to the "entities" section and you will find, at no 48, Drex Technologies SA of the BVI and its agent, Mossack Fonseca.
Next up, Argentinian oligarch Lázaro Báez:

The investigation and court records allege that Báez is the secret owner of more than 100 shell firms that Mossack Fonseca has helped establish in Nevada. All of them were managed by Aldyne Ltd., an anonymous company that Mossack Fonseca registered in the Seychelles Islands, according to prosecutors. (Mossack Fonseca has not been charged to date in either Argentina or Nevada, but one of its operatives in Las Vegas has been deposed in the legal case, and the district court has told the firm to turn over records related to the Báez shell companies, an order with which it has refused to fully comply.)
A former bank teller, Báez built a vast business empire through contracts awarded by his close friends Cristina and Néstor Kirchner, the current and previous presidents of Argentina, respectively, and their political allies in his home province, according to news reports and investigators. Báez was so bereft when his patron Néstor died, in 2010, that he erected a three-story mausoleum to house his remains. Prosecutors allege that the Nevada shells were part of a network that Báez used to move offshore more than $65 million in funds diverted from public infrastructure projects.

Yup, that is indeed the allegation, and there's some August 2014 Bloomberg coverage to go with it.
The connection to Mossack Fonseca goes via a company incorporated in Nevada, M.F. Corporate Services, directors Marta Edghill and Imogene Wilson. OpenCorporates has MARTA EDGHILL as director of 9,000+ Panamanian companies and IMOGENE WILSON (that form) as director of another 1,400. In each case that I checked, Mossack Fonseca was the Panama agent. I did not check all 10,400 companies. But I do think my sampling was good enough to establish that the Panamanian directors of the Nevada company M. F. CORPORATE SERVICES (NEVADA) LIMITED are professional nominee directors of Mossack Fonseca. It's the same outfit in a light disguise.
Why is Mossack Fonseca styling itself "M.F.'? Silverstein has a plausible explanation:

This sort of bogus separation is a tactic employed by many big shell-firm incorporators, because it allows the parent company to disavow any connection to its local offices if the shit hits the fan from a legal standpoint. It's sort of like how Walmart might operate in Bangladesh, distancing itself from sweatshops by long and complex supply chains. (Like Walmart, Mossack Fonseca has never been directly prosecuted for the actions of its affiliates.) "These are seamless, vertically integrated top-down organizations until the minute that a cop or investigator comes along," says Jack Blum, the money-laundering expert. "Then they disintegrate into a series of unconnected entities, and everyone swears they don't know anything about anyone else in the system. It's like a jigsaw puzzle that's assembled but suddenly falls apart when someone starts investigating."

Silverstein's own account of his visit to M.F.'s office, for a little talk with the local director, bears this out. Patricia Amunategui…

runs day-to-day operations, though internal company documents I found in court records show she works closely with Mossack Fonseca employees in Panama, such as Leticia Montoya, the custodian of record for dozens of shell firms linked to Lázaro Báez.

Confronted about the Mossack Fonseca link, she says:

"Give me your name, and I'll see if our attorney can talk to you," she said while shaking a finger in the negative.
"The attorney for Mossack Fonseca?" I asked.
"No, my company's attorney," she replied, referring to MF Corporate Services. "They're separate."

That's "separate" as in "bogus". Next, according to Silverstein, there's Mirror Development Inc, another Mossack Fonseca shell,

which Siemens of Germany employed to funnel bribes to Argentine government officials who helped it win a $1 billion contract to produce national identity cards.

Reuters agrees; the DoJ overview is here; Mirror Development Inc duly appears in the indictment. So far, there are mixed results for the defendants:

The SEC appears likely to reach three settlements, including Truppel's, and to win default judgment against two others. A federal judge in February dismissed charges against another defendant on jurisdictional grounds and the SEC withdrew its complaint against a seventh in October.
The results are mixed indeed: some of the defendants, and new ones, now face more charges, in Argentina.

Lastly, (I am leaving a few loose ends that hardly make much difference to the overall vista of horror), and paraphrasing and hyperlinking, Silverstein has yet more connections to Mossack Fonseca:

Billy Rautenbach, an alleged bagman for Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean despot, via Rautenbach's company Ridgepoint;
Yulia Tymoshenko, former Ukrainian prime minister, accused of participating in a Massive' bribery scheme, with another Mossack Fonseca company, Bassington Ltd, right at its heart, and another Swiss bank, Credit Suisse, implicated.
Beny Steinmetz, an Israeli billionaire who, Global Witness alleges, used offshore shell firms to pay a bribe to a wife of the homicidal dictator of Guinea, where Steinmetz was seeking (and subsequently got) a huge mining concession. Steinmetz tried, and failed, to use the UK's Data Protection Act in an attempt to muzzle Global Witness, a forlorn gambit. Happily, then, you can still read how the BVI shell company Pentler, heavily involved in the Steimetz story, and its apparent owner Onyx Financial Advisers, were both incorporated by Mossack Fonseca (PDF). Another faceless BVI company that is part of the plot, Magali, has the same BVI address as Mossack Fonseca & Co (BVI).

It's nice work by SIlverstein, putting that lot together.
In short, Mossack Fonseca are in it up to their thighs, and Stuart Gulliver has "no idea".
Amazingly, it's now quite likely to get even worse. On the very same day that Gulliver put in his tense appearance at the Treasury Select Committee, the Süddeutsche Zeitung had this (my English):

• The Mossack Fonseca Group, of Panama, is a well known provider of shell companies used by tax dodgers and other criminals
  
• Investigators from the USA and other states have obtained the firm's internal documents. Other countries are interested. German tax investigators have bought data relevant to Germany. On the basis of the documents, they are now carrying out raids.
  
• The various groups of officials are operating with selections of firm's records. Süddeutsche Zeitung has all of the data in the internal Mossack Fonseca documents at its disposal, more than 80 Gigabytes. Full evaluiation of the data is nowhere near complete.
  

There's more:

Thousands of shell companies, registered in the Seychelles, the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands or in Panama, built by Mossack Fonseca Group, ordered and paid for by Banks, wealth managers and lawyers from dozens of countries, can be found in the secret data on the USB sticks.
…
Clearly, Mossack Fonseca has a problem.

Onlookers can only agree.
It's a spectacular disaster. If, like Mossack Fonseca, your entire business model is predicated on secrecy and deniablity, a massive data leak, including gigabytes of emails, is the one thing that could kill you stone dead.
Mossack Fonseca are likely to find out if it's that bad in the coming months. HSBC and other banks, such as Credit Suisse and Commerzbank (summarizing the German: big tax investigation sparked by the Mossack Fonseca leak), will also have a problem.
For it just so happens that one of the authors of the SZ piece, Bastian Obermayer, is with the ICIJ. This Panama story looks like a natural for one of their leaks series. In fact the current ICIJ "Swiss Leaks" series, featuring HSBC, was the main reason why its execs were suddenly hauled in front of the Treasury Select Committee. Given HSBC's fondness for the Panama connection, 1998-2009 at least, I can't help wondering if there will be a Panama Leaks series soon, and a repeat appearance by Stuart Gulliver before the TSC. I'm pretty sure that even he will have heard of Mossack Fonseca, by then.
Back to Silverstein for one last grisly thought:

Documents and interviews I've conducted also show that Mossack Fonseca is happy to help clients set up so-called shelf companieswhich are the vintage wines of the money-laundering business, hated by law enforcement and beloved by crooks because they are "aged" for years before being sold, so that they appear to be established corporations with solid track recordsincluding in Las Vegas. One international asset manager who talked to Mossack Fonseca about doing business with them told me that the firm offered to sell a 50-year-old shelf company for $100,000.

That's a cue for more speculation: Gulliver, at his next TSC appearance, might have more to say about who's been using his still-registered Mossack Fonseca company, Worcester Equities Inc, since his minions kicked it back to Mossack Fonseca in 2009. Failing that, the ICIJ may enlighten us about who's running Worcester Equities now.
Unfortunately for HSBC, that's nowhere near the end of the horrors. Look out for further parts in this series.

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New Zealand's FMA, the Breder Suasso Conundrum, Mossack Fonseca, and #panamapapers

Posted on April 4, 2016 by Richard Smith
New Zealand Offshore FSPs are the result of a regulatory loophole that has created a running sore of fraud and money laundering, tainting New Zealand's reputation. Here are pages and pages, four years worth of coverage, from the tenacious New Zealand journalist Gareth Vaughan.
In this post, we will take a walk through one well-documented case that exemplifies the New Zealand Offshore FSP horror, and the reputation risk for New Zealand, and then draw readers' attention to a related but much bigger international offshore scandal, breaking this coming week, "Panamapapers".
Our stalking horse is Breder Suasso Limited, FSP number 360686, and the story starts in July 2014, just when New Zealand's financial regulator, FMA, took over supervision of the FSP register from Companies Office:

Grace Haden, an independent standing for election in Epsom, raised concerns with the regulators about Breder Suasso, which is referred to on overseas websites as a New Zealand bank and as providing banking services, despite not being registered as one here.
She pointed to a photo on the Auckland-based company's website, since removed, which featured a plush reception with an oil painting on the wall. In fact the company has a poky office with room for only a single desk and a line of filing cabinets down one wall.
Breder Suasso admitted the photo was faked for marketing purposes, a detail buried in fine print on the website.
…
Breder Suasso markets offshore accounts to foreigners, telling its clients on its website: "Your account information is kept confidential, our staff highly respect clients confidentiality and secrecy. People will know about your Breder Suasso Account only if you tell them."

Substituting the more specific "tax authorities" for the generic "people" should tell you why that's quite an aggressive marketing angle.
Meanwhile the term "Breder Suasso Account" is as misleading as the faked photo; Breder Suasso is not actually a bank:

The accounts are not its own however, but are set up with Polish Bank Bre Bank

FMA, just beginning to get its eye in to its new duties at that point, took a look and, judging by Breder Suasso's continuing registration, were satisfied that nothing was wrong with any of this.
Next, New Zealand journalist Gareth Vaughan took a seriously deep dive into Breder Suasso in September 2015:

A small office shared with three other companies deep in the bowels of the Outsource IT Tower on Auckland's Khyber Pass Road opposite a reservoir isn't necessarily where you'd expect to find the global headquarters of a financial service provider that claims to be following in the footsteps of three outstanding men from the Dutch golden age.
But this is where you will find what, according to its website, is Breder Suasso's head office. When interest.co.nz visited recently the office was unattended.

Vaughan observes a certain mutability in the business proposition:

Services listed include private accounts, corporate accounts, payment cards and advisory, although the advisory section appears to have been removed from the company's website over recent days.
…
Breder Suasso's website says it doesn't provide services to NZ or US residents, with the latter now having to comply with the intrusive Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA.

It gets cheesier:

There's also a Breder Suasso brochure on NZ trusts. Among other things it says; "The New Zealand Foreign Trust regime is considered to be one of the best if not the best offshore trust regimes in the world today." And; "a properly established trust provides virtually 100% protection against creditors." Plus; "In New Zealand there are many cases of personally bankrupt individuals who have been unable to pay their taxes or have failed in business but who still live in mansions and drive Ferraris owned by their trusts and there is nothing anyone including the Government can do about it."
Other comments in Breder Suasso's NZ trusts brochure focus on property, and obtaining NZ residency.
"You may not have known that property in New Zealand is not taxed for capital gain and that we can obtain loans of 50% of the value of the property. That means that by establishing a trust and buying New Zealand property you can realise long term gains that are tax free." "Buying property in New Zealand can also allow the investors to obtain residency for themselves and their families. Thus the trust can become both an investment, asset protection and migration vehicle rolled into one."
How about mortgagee property?
"We can also assist you in acquiring for sale or mortgagee property in New Zealand, Panama, Las Vegas, as well as opening brokerage, investment, forex accounts or physical precious metal holdings held in the name of your trust."

18 months later, there's been an office move from the embarrassing reservoir-side location, to another serviced office address shared with dozens of other companies, for all the good that will do to the look. The business proposition has changed a lot more, too.
Right now, Breder Suasso just offers bank account opening services and payment cards. The trust and company formation services, the other account opening services and the property acquisition services have all gone, along with the boast about bankrupts driving Ferraris.
There's no sign of Bre Bank any more either, whether under that name, or its more recent manifestation as MBank (it's a Polish subsidiary of German giant Commerzbank). So where are the bank accounts? They can't be in New Zealand: Breder Suasso has no New Zealand clients. The accounts must all be offshore. Up until a few weeks ago, Breder Suasso's corporate account opening service stated that the related account opening agreement was subject to the law of the Marshall Islands. But the brochure has now vanished too.
Meanwhile the Breder Suasso payment card service is a bit hair-raising: up to 100 (or perhaps, just 20: the web site copy is inconsistent) prepaid payment cards may be issued to the employees of any company using Breder Suasso's card service. One wonders what steps Breder Suasso takes to counteract the sort of prepaid card abuse written up here:

Recent ebanking heists such as a $121,000 online robbery at a New York fuel supplier last month suggest that cyber thieves increasingly are cashing out by sending victim funds to prepaid debit card accounts. The shift appears to be an effort to route around a major bottleneck for these crimes: Their dependency on unreliable money mules.
…
I've interviewed now more than 200 money mules, and it's hard to escape the conclusion that many mules simply are not the sharpest crayons in the box. They often have trouble following simple instructions, and frequently screw up important details when it comes time to cash out (there are probably good reasons that a lot of these folks are unemployed). Common goofs include transposing digits in account and routing numbers, or failing to get to the bank to withdraw the cash shortly after the fraudulent transfer, giving the victim's bank precious time to reverse the transaction. In isolated cases, the mules simply disappear with the money and stiff the cyber thieves.
In several recent ebanking heists, however, thieves appear to have sent at least half of the transfers to prepaid cards, potentially sidestepping the expense and hassle of hiring and using money mules. For example, last month cyber crooks struck Alta East, a wholesale gasoline dealer in Middletown, N.Y. According to the firm's comptroller Debbie Weeden, the thieves initiated 30 separate fraudulent transfers totaling more than $121,000. Half of those transfers went to prepaid cards issued by Metabank, a large prepaid card provider.

Those are personal prepaid cards. One imagines, though, that the problem is just as acute, if not more so, with corporate cards. Happily, Breder Suasso's web site makes great play of its commitment to comply with "all legal obligations relating to Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) according to the New Zealand anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 (the AML/CFT Act)".
Less happily, that stated commitment could all be cosmetic waffle: Gareth Vaughan establishes that Breder Suasso isn't actually caught by the New Zealand anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 at all:

Breder Suasso, the NZ registered but overseas operating financial service provider that featured in this interest.co.nz article last week, operates outside the territorial scope of this country's anti-money laundering legislation, the Department of Internal Affairs has confirmed.
As noted in last week's article, interest.co.nz had emailed a series of questions to Teodoro De Regibus, who Companies Office records list as Breder Suasso's sole shareholder. A response to the questions, from Breder Suasso's partnerships manager Benjamin Cohen on behalf of De Regibus, was received after last week's story was published.
Among other things Cohen says, "In November 2014, the Department of Internal Affairs fully reviewed our Anti Money Laundering and CFT (countering financing of terrorism) policies with no adverse comments or recommendations of any changes needed to our robust policy of only dealing with low risk clients."

Vaughan adds drily:

The Department of Internal Affairs version of the story is, however, a little different.

Indeed it is:

"In October 2014, the Department initiated a desk based review of Breder Suasso Limited's AML/CFT programme documents. During this review, it was identified that the financial activities conducted by Breder Suasso Limited were not being carried on in New Zealand in the ordinary course of business. On this basis, Breder Suasso Limited's activities were determined to be outside the territorial scope of the Act. In turn, it was determined that Breder Suasso Limited is not captured as an AML/CFT reporting entity in New Zealand," the spokesman said.

So there you have it. Breder Suasso is a registered New Zealand financial services provider, with an ever changing product offering, that doesn't have to comply with NZ AML requirements (but would like you to think that it does), and currently offers no banking services to New Zealand clients, but does offer bank accounts and prepaid cards, somewhere on the planet, possibly via unidentified banks domiciled in the Marshall Islands and mBank in Poland, to unspecified non-New Zealand persons and business entities.
That doesn't look like a particularly transparent or salubrious business proposition. There are a few more pointers.
First, there's this Marshall Islands connection. The Marshall Islands are an interesting tax haven. Their currency is the US dollar, but they mainly crop up as a domicile of entities associated with the post-Soviet offshore finance system, usually alongside Latvia and Cyprus.
So that's where one naturally looks next, and promptly finds Breder Suasso's Latvian company, at another mailbox address, and then, via LinkedIn, Breder Suasso's Cyprus connection:


Jevgenija's mother tongue is, unsurprisingly, Russian, and she learnt her trade at Rietumu Banka, which, like many of Latvia's oligarch-controlled boutique banks, has collected the occasional money laundering wristslap from Latvia's financial regulator.
Meanwhile Breder Suasso's subsidiary in Georgia (the US state, not the Eurasian country) doesn't seem to be doing anything much. For instance, it doesn't seem to have a banking licence.
Still, this is enough to make it look as if a lot of what Breder Suasso is doing is connected to offshore finance for Russians, not always the cleanest banking business in the world.
It's possible that Breder Suasso's Polish subsidiary is part of that too, along with Polish mBank. There might be a bit of extra pressure on mBank to be, well, an aggressive business builder at the moment. In January last year, having sold a bunch of Swiss-franc-denominated mortgages to zloty-earning Poles, mBank and other Polish banks were horribly caught out by the instant huge appreciation of the Swiss Franc that occurred when the Swiss announced that they had abandoned attempts to cap its exchange rate against the Euro. In Poland, by August, the whole story had got very political:

Polish banks fell heavily on Thursday after deputies approved a bill allowing homeowners to convert their Swiss franc mortgages into zlotys, a move which could double the cost to lenders to $5 billion.
Poland's financial regulator called for an impact assessment on bank stability if the measure were passed into law.
…
Public opinion is divided over state support for should support Swiss franc mortgage owners, who are mostly well paid professionals.
Shares in Poland's major banks most affected by the proposed changes recovered sharply after Kleina's comments, but at 2:43 GMT were still down by between 6 and 19 percent.
Shares in some of Poland's biggest banks, which are mostly owned by foreign parents, plunged by as much as 24 percent at one stage. Getin Noble, the most exposed to Swiss franc mortgage risk, was still down by 19 percent at 2:47 GMT.
The sector, which includes PKO, BZ WBK, mBank, Millennium, and BPH hold Swiss franc portfolios worth some 144 billion zlotys, or 8 percent of Poland's gross domestic product (GDP).

For the moment, mBank isn't paying a dividend. Its debt is graded BBB- by Fitch, which is just between "good quality" and "speculative". That's not exactly great, for a bank, but not cataclysmic, either; not with Commerzbank backing up mBank.
So anyway…Breder Suasso's business all looks a bit Russian, so far. But there's more: a surprising Francophone connection. Here's Breder Suasso's Brussels department:

…and some more…

Perhaps, after Swissleaks, there's demand in Francophone territory for something more secure than an HSBC account. From whom: diamond dealers? Dentists? Who knows.
One conclusion involves less guess work: there's damn all indication that Breder Suasso has anything much to do with New Zealand financial services. On the other hand, quite a lot that is nothing to do with New Zealand, and doesn't look all that great, is hanging off that FSP registration.
The least good-looking thing is the resonantly-named Teodoro de Regibus, 100% shareholder of Breder Suasso Limited of New Zealand. Vaughan observes that de Regibus, a resident of Hitchin, UK, according to the New Zealand info on Breder Suasso, appears also to live in Mauritius, where he operates a licensed corporate services firm: Titan Corporate Services Ltd. He's also the sole director of a UK Breder company.
His Hitchin address indicates another bit of pedigree: for 20 years, he was on the board of Mossack Fonseca & Co UK, and of RM Company Services, Mossack Fonseca's UK subsidiary, based in Hitchin. This is of course the same Panamanian Mossack Fonseca found recently on Naked Capitalism supplying companies that facilitated government corruption in Brazil (Petrobras) and Malta (Panamagate) and a giant bank fraud in Moldova. That's barely the start of it: vice.com's 2014 article on Mossack Fonseca, The Law Firm That Works with Oligarchs, Money Launderers, and Dictators has much more. Even that's not the end of it. Coming this week, there's Panamapapers, a huge expose based on a massive email leak from Mossack Fonseca. It may start in Finland, but it certainly won't end there:

Panamaleaks ties three of this blogger's eccentric long running obsessions, New Zealand FSPs, New Zealand Foreign Trusts, and Mossack Fonseca (especially here and here), into one huge stinky mess.
Intriguingly, Mossack Fonseca are being less than 100% candid with their clients about the age of the data leak. Here, courtesy of Daphne in Malta, is the missive Mossack Fonseca sent out a couple of days ago:

That makes it sound as if the leak has only just happened, doesn't it? But that's just Mossack Fonseca bullshitting its clients. You can read the real story of the leak in a year old post at Naked Capitalism about HSBC CEO Stuart Gulliver's embarrassing connection to a Mossack Fonseca company:

Mossack Fonseca are in it up to their thighs, and Stuart Gulliver has "no idea".
Amazingly, it's now quite likely to get even worse. On the very same day that Gulliver put in his tense appearance at the Treasury Select Committee, the Süddeutsche Zeitung had this (my English):

• The Mossack Fonseca Group, of Panama, is a well known provider of shell companies used by tax dodgers and other criminals
  
• Investigators from the USA and other states have obtained the firm's internal documents. Other countries are interested. German tax investigators have bought data relevant to Germany. On the basis of the documents, they are now carrying out raids.
  
• The various groups of officials are operating with selections of firm's records. Süddeutsche Zeitung has all of the data in the internal Mossack Fonseca documents at its disposal, more than 80 Gigabytes. Full evaluiation of the data is nowhere near complete.
  

There's more:
Thousands of shell companies, registered in the Seychelles, the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands or in Panama, built by Mossack Fonseca Group, ordered and paid for by Banks, wealth managers and lawyers from dozens of countries, can be found in the secret data on the USB sticks.
…
Clearly, Mossack Fonseca has a problem.
Onlookers can only agree.
It's a spectacular disaster. If, like Mossack Fonseca, your entire business model is predicated on secrecy and deniablity, a massive data leak, including gigabytes of emails, is the one thing that could kill you stone dead.
Mossack Fonseca are likely to find out if it's that bad in the coming months. HSBC and other banks, such as Credit Suisse and Commerzbank (summarizing the German: big tax investigation sparked by the Mossack Fonseca leak), will also have a problem.
For it just so happens that one of the authors of the SZ piece, Bastian Obermayer, is with the ICIJ. This Panama story looks like a natural for one of their leaks series. In fact the current ICIJ "Swiss Leaks" series, featuring HSBC, was the main reason why its execs were suddenly hauled in front of the Treasury Select Committee. Given HSBC's fondness for the Panama connection, 1998-2009 at least, I can't help wondering if there will be a Panama Leaks series soon, and a repeat appearance by Stuart Gulliver before the TSC. I'm pretty sure that even he will have heard of Mossack Fonseca, by then.

Well, Panamapapers has just hit the media, world-wide. Apparently Mossack Fonseca didn't see fit to tell their clients about this well-publicized forthcoming event for a whole year. The unnecessary lack of notice would irritate me, if I was a corrupt head of state, or a person "involved in organised crime". Mind you, as I wrote back in 2011,

…my tip to the fraudsters: you can't trust the Panamanian lawyers that you are dealing with. They are scamming you. If they get into trouble, they will turn you in.

Back in the smaller world of New Zealand FSPs, it's over to MBIE and FMA to figure out what, if anything, needs to be done about Breder Suasso. There might be another wee reputation problem coming round the corner.
And now, it's eyes down for #Panamapapers: for that, follow @icijorg and @occrp on Twitter.

• Overview from Süddeutsche Zeitung. The leaks have got a lot bigger: it's 40 years worth of Mossack Fonseca documents.
  
• First of the stories: Putin, in The Guardian (not a huge surprise)
  
• Heads of state and relatives, at the ICIJ
  
• HSBC again.
  
• Loads more to come…
  

Quote:Mossack was born in Germany in 1948. He moved to Panama with his family in the early 1960s, according to his law partner.
Mossack's father had been a member of the Waffen-SS, the notorious armed wing of the Nazi Party during World War II, according to U.S. Army intelligence files obtained by ICIJ.
After the war the father offered his services to the U.S. government as an informant, the files show, claiming "he was about to join a clandestine organization, either of former Nazis now turned Communist . . . or of unconverted Nazis cloaking themselves as Communists." An Army intelligence officer wrote that the offer to spy for the U.S. might simply be "a shrewd attempt to get out of an awkward situation."
Nevertheless, the old intelligence files indicate that Mossack's father later ended up in Panama, where he offered to spy, this time for the CIA, on Communist activity in nearby Cuba.
After earning a law degree in Panama in 1973, the son worked for a time as a lawyer in London before returning to Panama to start the firm that he would later merge to form Mossack Fonseca & Co.

Magda Hassan Wrote:I've been having a bit of a look at the company Mossack Fonesca. It is a partnership between 2 lawyers. Jurgen Mossack's father was in the SS and Wikipeadia is very vague but says he ended up working for the US as a spy against Cuba and ended up in Panama. Has Paperclip type ratline written all over it.

More here from the ICIJ:

Quote:Mossack was born in Germany in 1948. He moved to Panama with his family in the early 1960s, according to his law partner.
Mossack's father had been a member of the Waffen-SS, the notorious armed wing of the Nazi Party during World War II, according to U.S. Army intelligence files obtained by ICIJ.
After the war the father offered his services to the U.S. government as an informant, the files show, claiming "he was about to join a clandestine organization, either of former Nazis now turned Communist . . . or of unconverted Nazis cloaking themselves as Communists." An Army intelligence officer wrote that the offer to spy for the U.S. might simply be "a shrewd attempt to get out of an awkward situation."
Nevertheless, the old intelligence files indicate that Mossack's father later ended up in Panama, where he offered to spy, this time for the CIA, on Communist activity in nearby Cuba.
After earning a law degree in Panama in 1973, the son worked for a time as a lawyer in London before returning to Panama to start the firm that he would later merge to form Mossack Fonseca & Co.

Panama Papers: ATO investigating more than 800 Australian clients of Mossack Fonseca

DateApril 4, 2016 - 4:20PM

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Neil Chenoweth

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What are the Panama Papers?

Described as the world's biggest data leak, the 11.5 million documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca reveal how law firms and banks sell financial secrecy to some of the world's wealthiest. Courtesy ABC News 24.



The Australian Taxation Office is investigating more than 800 high net wealth Australian clients of the controversial Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca, which is the focus of an unprecedented leak of tax haven records released globally.
More than 11.5 million documents have been leaked from Mossack Fonseca's files, revealing the secrets of hundreds of thousands of clients including several thousand Australians covering a period over almost 40 years, from 1977 until as recently as last December.
The release of the documents on Monday follows a 12-month investigation by media groups including The Australian Financial Review, led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington.

The ATO is examining the dealings of 800 Australian high net worth individuals and has linked more than 120 of them to an associate offshore service provider situated in Hong Kong Photo: Andrew Quilty

"Currently we have identified over 800 individual [Australian] taxpayers and we have now linked over 120 of them to an associate offshore service provider located in Hong Kong," the ATO said in a statement to the Financial Review.
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The files show how Mossack Fonseca thwarted Australian regulators and police inquiries, continued to act for individuals accused of fraud and embezzlement, and lobbied actively to prevent Australia from signing agreements that would allow the exchange of tax information with Samoa, a key tax avoidance jurisdiction.
While most investors and corporations who use tax havens have legitimate reasons to use these structures, the leaked records also show some companies domiciled in tax havens were being used for suspected money laundering, arms and drug deals, and tax avoidance.

ATO chief compliance officer Michael Mr Cranston said some of the Australians under scrutiny had previously been investigated by the Tax Office but the probe included a "large number of taxpayers who haven't previously come forward."

"Some cases may be referred to the Serious Financial Crime Taskforce," ATO deputy commissioner Michael Cranston told the Financial Review, confirming the Australian link with Mossack Fonseca.
The data includes high wealth individuals "and we are already taking action on those cases", Mr Cranston said.
"ATO intelligence on tax evasion comes from a variety of sources, including from concerned citizens, advisers, partner agencies and international bodies.




"For example, the ATO has raised tax liabilities of around $400 million from data supplied by confidential informants.
"We are also working closely with the AFP, ACC and AUSTRAC to further cross-check the data and strengthen our intelligence."
Mr Cranston said some of the Australians under scrutiny had previously been investigated by the Tax Office but the probe included a "large number of taxpayers who haven't previously come forward".

The German connection

The ATO investigation is based on a smaller set of files detailing Mossack Fonseca's Luxembourg operations, which were sold to the German government by a former employee, triggering scores of raids by tax investigators who targeted Commerzbank​ clients in Germany in February last year.
German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung​, working with the ICIJ, subsequently obtained much more extensive files, with a total 2.6 terabytes of data for Mossack Fonseca's entire global operations, from an anonymous informant. No payment was made.
Mossack Fonseca told its clients over the weekend that it had brought in external consultants to investigate "an unauthorised breach of our mail server" and warned that "the information that has been accessed from our files has fallen into the hands of reporters from certain media outlets who have been taking information out of context and making false assumptions about the nature of our services".
"They have already contacted us in an effort to confirm their allegations and ask further questions," Mossack Fonseca said. "We have responded in a general manner and have not provided details that would further expose confidential information."
The Panamanian firm is one of the top five global groups providing corporate registry services in 21 low-tax jurisdictions around the world for more than 214,000 companies, trusts and foundations, providing an essential services for legitimate companies and investors, including BHP Billiton.
But the files show that the firm also protects its less reputable clients, keeping Swiss advisory firm Strachans on its books despite a decade of Project Wickenby investigations initially focused on Strachans that led to 46 criminal convictions, including a jail term for a Strachans partner, Philip de Figueiredo.
Another Wickenby target, Rockhampton-born lawyer Peter Borgas, based in Switzerland, remained a valued Mossack client even after he was arrested in Sydney in 2013 (the charge was dropped five months later).
Last December, Mossack decided it would not act on its probity concerns for a firm controlled by Tan Yixin, a Chinese executive jailed for 3½ years for bribes and leaking secrets to Australia's Rio Tinto, because "the client will destroy us with their comments" in the high-growth Chinese market.
When the Australian Federal Police wrote to Mossack Fonseca's British Virgin Islands office in July 2012 to enforce an Australian court order to sell a Perth apartment on which a BVI company, Anchorville Holdings Ltd, allegedly held a mortgage, Mossack replied that Anchorville had been struck off in 2007 and asked the AFP to stop sending letters.
Perth entrepreneur Roger Bryer had lived for a decade in the spectacular Perth penthouse, which was tied up in lengthy criminal trials over a $US15 million ($19.5 million) embezzlement case involving Commerzbank. Most of the proceeds had been transferred to Australian accounts controlled by Mr Bryer, to invest. Mr Bryer told police he had no knowledge the money was stolen. It was not suggested that he had acted improperly.
In 2012, the DPP applied to sell the penthouse as part of the proceeds of crime, but Anchorville had been set up as mortgagee on it.
Rebuffed by Mossack Fonseca, the AFP obtained a BVI search warrant in November 2012. A Mossack executive produced old documentation showing Anchorville was owned by yet another nominee company.
Meanwhile, Mossack had contacted the original registered owner of Anchorville and offered to reinstate the company, for $5487. As part of that reinstatement, new documents were registered in 2013 that showed that Bryer had owned Anchorville since 2001.
Mr Bryer told the Financial Review on Sunday that he had made it clear to the AFP that he controlled Anchorville and the matter had been completely resolved in a confidential settlement with the AFP and DPP on February 6, 2013.
While Anchorville was set up as a mortgagee company, its mortgage on the penthouse was not valid.
"I have very grave doubts as to whether they were acting legitimately," Mr Bryer said of Mossack Fonseca. "None of it was credible for that company."
But it is Mossack Fonseca's deep links with governments that appear most worrying.

Government links

In 1996 Mossack won a 20-year exclusive contract to create and administer offshore companies for the tiny South Pacific island nation of Niue. When international pressure closed this down in 2004, the firm moved to Samoa and New Zealand.
Last year Mossack's offices created secret offshore trusts in New Zealand that owned companies in Panama with a Dubai account, for senior government figures in Malta.
Mossack is also persona grata in Apia.
"As you are aware, we have been deliberately stalling the proposals from OECD countries to enter into Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEA)," the chief executive of the Samoa International Finance Authority, Erna Vaai, wrote to the Panama firm in June 2007.
Mossack had been lobbying against the Australian move to sign a TIEA with Samoa since 2004, warning that offshore companies would abandon Samoa if it did any deal with Australia.
Now Samoa was facing "mounting international pressures" for a TIEA with Australia and Vaai wanted Mossack to help write Samoa's formal response.
Vaai echoed Mossack's arguments that a TIEA was "not in Samoa's interests given it will only benefit Australia as the information flow is only likely to be one way".
While Samoa eventually signed the TIEA with Australia in 2009, in practice Australian information requests to Samoa can take more than three years to process.
The Mossack Fonseca files offer a walk through some of the best known names in Australian business, but this can be misleading, because there is nothing wrong with owning an offshore company, unless there is taxable income that is not disclosed.

Offshore structures

In many instances the offshore holdings appear entirely mundane, with no suggestion of impropriety, such as former Toll Holdings boss Mark Rowsthorn in 2007 setting up a British Virgin Islands company, Hendricks Development Ltd, to invest in a Hong Kong company renting apartments.
Filmmaker Chris Noonan and his partner Glenys Rowe held bearer shares in Steppe Films International Ltd, which was incorporated in the BVI in September 1996, a year after Noonan directed the Australian film Babe, which reportedly earned $US470 million in worldwide box office and video sales.
There is nothing to suggest impropriety in this or in the following examples, but they reveal the web of offshore structures used by the wealthy.
In 2008, Sydney developer George Ghossayn​, who at the time was a regular in the appointment diary of Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid​ before later switching his support to the Liberal Party, was setting up an offshore partnership with fellow developer Fouad Deiri​, in a BVI company, Fitall Development Limited.
In September 2013, convicted cocaine dealer-turned-Queensland property developer Joseph Frangieh​ took control of a Seychelles company, Silver Tiger Enterprises Limited.
In late 2011, sports promoter Dominic Galati​ was publicly challenging to replace Frank Lowy as chairman of Football Federation Australia, "because I believe that someone has to be a voice out there for the people that are passionate about this game".
Behind the scenes, Galati was involved in setting up half a dozen companies in Samoa, which were transferred to a new Hong Kong company, Global Wealth Group, controlled by Galati, William Aloisi, John McGeary and Roy Bijkerk.
William Aloisi's website describes him as an investment banker. Mr McGeary is a greyhound trainer, while Bijkerk is a convicted cocaine importer who has built a property empire through Guardian Care Properties.
A remarkable 269 shareholdings of companies in the British Virgin Islands, Samoa, the Seychelles and Panama, almost all of them holding bearer shares, are linked to just four addresses on the Gold Coast associated with family members of Ian Taylor, a New Zealand businessman who, with his father Geoffrey Taylor, has set up shell companies that have since been linked to arms deals, Mexican drug lords and Russia's largest tax fraud.
There has been no suggestion of illegality by the Taylors.
Ian Taylor has previously told Fairfax that "only a small handful" of their companies were misused.
"Clients of certain nationalities are discriminated against only due to their citizenship."



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/panama-papers-ato-investigating-more-than-800-australian-clients-of-mossack-fonseca-20160403-gnxgu8.html#ixzz44r35ezRA
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook
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Panama Papers - Magda Hassan - 04-04-2016

Oh and I forgot to mention the more than passing resemblance of the Mossack Fonesca logo to that of NATO.

---

Panama Papers - Magda Hassan - 04-04-2016

David Guyatt Wrote:

Magda Hassan Wrote:I've been having a bit of a look at the company Mossack Fonesca. It is a partnership between 2 lawyers. Jurgen Mossack's father was in the SS and Wikipeadia is very vague but says he ended up working for the US as a spy against Cuba and ended up in Panama. Has Paperclip type ratline written all over it.

More here from the ICIJ:

Quote:Mossack was born in Germany in 1948. He moved to Panama with his family in the early 1960s, according to his law partner.
Mossack's father had been a member of the Waffen-SS, the notorious armed wing of the Nazi Party during World War II, according to U.S. Army intelligence files obtained by ICIJ.
After the war the father offered his services to the U.S. government as an informant, the files show, claiming "he was about to join a clandestine organization, either of former Nazis now turned Communist . . . or of unconverted Nazis cloaking themselves as Communists." An Army intelligence officer wrote that the offer to spy for the U.S. might simply be "a shrewd attempt to get out of an awkward situation."
Nevertheless, the old intelligence files indicate that Mossack's father later ended up in Panama, where he offered to spy, this time for the CIA, on Communist activity in nearby Cuba.
After earning a law degree in Panama in 1973, the son worked for a time as a lawyer in London before returning to Panama to start the firm that he would later merge to form Mossack Fonseca & Co.

Oh boy, this could also have a connection to the Bormann Brotherhood and their investing of Nazi loot throughout the world. Maybe. Perhaps.

Fonesca is not a Spanish family name either. Both these boys may have been born in Panama but their family are European. I am thinking Fonesca might be Romanian but not sure.

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Panama Papers - Magda Hassan - 04-04-2016

David Guyatt Wrote:The Oz Connection from The Sydney Morning Herald (it makes the Guardian look like the effing bitch comic it really is)

[source]
Panama Papers: ATO investigating more than 800 Australian clients of Mossack Fonseca

DateApril 4, 2016 - 4:20PM

• 171 reading now
  
• Read later
  

Neil Chenoweth

Investigative Reporter

View more articles from Neil Chenoweth
Follow Neil on Twitter



[/source]

Neil Chenoweth being one of the more enlightened and sane financial journalists we have.

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