Pandora Papers: Secret wealth and dealings of world leaders exposed

[Chippy_Tea]

I was going to put this in the "you couldn't make it up" thread but i think it deserves its own -
ex-UK PM Tony Blair and his wife saved £312,000 in stamp duty when they bought a London office.


The secret wealth and dealings of world leaders, politicians and billionaires has been exposed in one of the biggest leaks of financial documents.
Some 35 current and former leaders and more than 300 public officials are featured in the files from offshore companies, dubbed the Pandora Papers.
They reveal the King of Jordan secretly amassed £70m of UK and US property.
They also show how ex-UK PM Tony Blair and his wife saved £312,000 in stamp duty when they bought a London office.

• LIVE: Follow our coverage of the document leak

The couple bought an offshore firm that owned the building.
The leak also links Russian President Vladimir Putin to secret assets in Monaco, and shows the Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis - facing an election later this week - failed to declare an offshore investment company used to purchase two villas for £12m in the south of France.
It is the latest in a string of leaks over the past seven years, following the FinCen Files, the Paradise Papers, the Panama Papers and LuxLeaks.

• A simple guide to the Pandora Papers leak
• King of Jordan amassed £70m secret property empire
• Blairs saved £312,000 stamp duty in property deal

The examination of the files is the largest organised by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), with more than 650 reporters taking part.
BBC Panorama in a joint investigation with the Guardian and the other media partners have had access to 12 million documents from 14 financial services companies in countries including the British Virgin Islands, Panama, Belize, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Switzerland.

Some figures are facing allegations of corruption, money laundering and global tax avoidance.
But one of the biggest revelations is how prominent and wealthy people have been legally setting up companies to secretly buy property in the UK.
The documents reveal the owners of some of the 95,000 offshore firms behind the purchases.
It highlights the UK government's failure to introduce a register of offshore property owners despite repeated promises to do so, amid concerns some property buyers could be hiding money-laundering activities.
The Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his family, who have been accused of looting their own country, are one example.
The investigation found the Aliyevs and their close associates have secretly been involved in property deals in the UK worth more than £400m.

Full article - Pandora Papers: Secret wealth and dealings of world leaders exposed

 

[JockyBrewer]

We've known that this is happening for decades, and yet successive governments have done very little to combat it. I hoped Brexit might free the government from any constraints on making real progress on these issues, but nothing has been announced, let alone enacted. My only conclusion is that a lot of them have benefitted from this - either themselves, friends, family or business connections.

For the 99%+ of us not buying multi million pound properties via overseas entities it has a sizeable impact on our wallets:
- First of all it starves funding for public services that we need.
- It inflates the property market all the way down the ladder.

At the very least, is it really so hard to have a system where people either directly or indirectly benefitting from political corruption and human rights abuses aren't allowed to quite literally buy a piece of the UK? That would be a start.

 

[An Ankoù]

We've known that this is happening for decades, and yet successive governments have done very little to combat it. I hoped Brexit might free the government from any constraints on making real progress on these issues, but nothing has been announced, let alone enacted. My only conclusion is that a lot of them have benefitted from this - either themselves, friends, family or business connections.

For the 99%+ of us not buying multi million pound properties via overseas entities it has a sizeable impact on our wallets:
- First of all it starves funding for public services that we need.
- It inflates the property market all the way down the ladder.

At the very least, is it really so hard to have a system where people either directly or indirectly benefitting from political corruption and human rights abuses aren't allowed to quite literally buy a piece of the UK? That would be a start.

Quite the contrary. The EU are, allegedly, closing these loopholes and that's what caused the panic to get Brexit done. The UK, quite apart from it's own tax dodgers, is the biggest money launderer in the world. We haven't seen even the tip of the iceberg yet.

 

[Leon103]

Not sure why they needed to read over 6milliom document to find this out. We all know it's going on. Create a loophole and people will exploit it.

Governments want to regulate the crypto financial market to protect the public, how about doing something about tradition markets first.