Posts by Russell Brown
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Good column by the Herald's Matt Nippert on getting access to the data today:
A small Herald team, including a data specialist capable of wrangling the entire dataset and matching it against official records, has spent the morning poring over the results. So far we've found more than a dozen people and entities which justify ongoing interest and investigation, including several facing criminal charges abroad and New Zealanders with chequered reputations who seem to be repeating old tricks.
The Cook Islands and Niue also figure in structures which feature the names of prominent United States and United Kingdom investors. The head of a United Kingdom property investment fund worth about $1 billion is named as the shareholder of the fund, based in Asia, through Niue. The address for the ownership skips back through Niue to an address in Brazil to Panama.
The richest person in an Eastern European country appears to have used Mossack Fonseca to safeguard his wealth and provides a contact address in Mount Eden. A member of the Russian mafia appears to have used a North Shore law firm to go into business with teacher of Japanese massage therapy.
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Heh. It's not the real 60 Minutes account – someone noticed the Twitter handle was available and grabbed it. But still!
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Hard News: Forgetting what we didn't know, in reply to tom dale,
but the video has been set to private, presumably because they called NZ a ‘Tax Haven’, as referenced in the response here
You win your (currently virtual) chocolate fish!
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Also, a chocolate fish to anyone who can find that 2012 60 Minutes report on the TV3 or Newshub websites. The internal link from the programme brief is broken, but on past form, it'll still be there somewhere. (MediaWorks' habit of hiding historical content is really quite odd.)
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Polity: Is being a tax haven worth it?, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Sorry you had to read that, Stephen. I've been out making a show then eating dinner.
Steve Barnes is now very fucking banned.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Brent Jackson,
Thanks Brent. I meant to reply (we're trying to put a show together right now) but that's better than I could have phrased it.
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Polity: Is being a tax haven worth it?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
What is far more relevant is if this disclosure of NZ as a place where shifty businessmen evade taxes starts impacting our trading partners.
“So you want us to buy your milk powder and meat – well then how about you stop sheltering our tax evaders.”It's actually puzzling that some of the usual commentators can't get their heads around this.
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But New Zealand doesn’t just have its share of wealthy tax-dodgers.
This is an entire country embarrassed and tarnished by the contents of Mossack Fonesca’s secret files.
New Zealand is a large chapter of the Panama Papers. It is referenced a staggering 60,940 times.
Roger Thompson – Mossack Fonesca’s man on the ground – features in 4560 documents, and his firm Bentleys well over 3000 times.
This is a damaging chapter, because unlike some of the other jurisdictions featured - Panama, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, for example - New Zealand has a clean reputation to lose.
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The interesting thing is how the stories – today's ones, but even more so the AFR story that Stuff basically squandered on Friday – show how much the use of NZ trusts was accelerating:
In 2013 Mossack Fonseca had been on a marketing drive, cutting its prices to build up its New Zealand office.
"Chase the money," head office in Panama urged its New Zealand staff.
Mossack Fonseca offered two New Zealand products to its overseas clients: an NZ foreign trust, and a Look Through Company (LTC).
As long as the trust and the LTC had no income in New Zealand and had no New Zealand beneficiaries, then they paid no New Zealand tax.
But there was another advantage because technically the LTC was taxed, it's just that the tax rate was set at zero.
One French investor who moved his holding company from Luxembourg to a New Zealand LTC knew he would pay no tax.
But New Zealand has a double-tax treaty with France, which meant that he could repatriate the profit to France where it was not taxable because it had already been "taxed" in New Zealand.
While New Zealand's tax laws are a major plus for foreign investors, it's not the only attraction. They also come to use New Zealand's good reputation.
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This new UN Human Rights flier is a pretty strong rejection of the UNGASS outcome.
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