.
And the Jewish Zionists who run the City of London and also like Israelis profited both from 9/11 and the Iraq war etc.,are also of course enmeshed in offshore accounts NOT just for tax avoidance but for financial scams that defraud their fellow citizens.......
Panama Papers: Ex-MPs, Lords And David Cameron's Father ...
Huffington Post UK-Apr 4, 2016
Former Conservative MPs, peers and David Cameron's late father are among scores of people and politicians whose financial affairs have ...
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/apr/20/david-cameron-jersey-panama-geneva
Valued today at £25m, the Panamanian fund was established in 1982 while David was still at Eton, the school that his father attended. At the time, Ian Cameron still worked at Panmure Gordon, the City broking firm at which three generations of the family were senior partners.
The family's banking history goes back even further, to the 1860s, when Sir Ewen Cameron joined the industry. He later helped the Rothschild banking dynasty sell war bonds during the Russo-Japanese war. While at Panmure Gordon, Ian was a bond specialist too, showing determination to overcome his physical disability – he was born with deformed legs – and make partner at the firm by the age of 30.
What little we know of the historic activities of Blairmore Holdings comes from a shareholders' prospectus issued in 2006, less than a year after David Cameronbecame leader of the opposition.
The prospectus, designed to attract investors with a licence to take risks, notes that Ian Cameron, a director of the company, "was instrumental in the formation of Blairmore Holdings Inc" and explains that the fund is designed to "provide investors with steady long-term capital growth over and above the global rate of inflation".
It states: "The affairs of the fund should be managed and conducted so that it does not become resident in the United Kingdom for UK taxation purposes."...............
http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.712497
Panama Papers: Hundreds of Israeli Companies, Shareholders Listed in Leaked Documents Detailing Offshore Holdings
Leaked documents of Panamanian law firm reveal shell companies linked to prominent Israeli lawyers and business persons.
Uri Blau, Daniel Dolev and Shuki Sadeh Apr 03, 2016
The Panama Papers: Politicians, Criminals, and the Rogue Industry That Hides Their CashICIJ
Panama Papers: Massive tax haven document leak exposes corruption and crime on global scale
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Some 600 Israeli companies and 850 Israeli shareholders are listed in the leaked documents of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, a leader in creating shell companies that often serve to conceal ownership of assets.
The leaked files, which were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with Haaretz and other media organizations, provide a glimpse of the economy that until now had been hidden from the Israeli public.
There is a number of prominent names among the shareholders. It is important to note that as long as holdings in the companies and their revenues — if any — are reported as required to Israeli tax authorities, owning the company is not against the law.
Mossack Fonseca’s branch in Israel is headed by attorney Amir Maor. Callers to the branch are informed by a voicemail message that they have reached the offices of “The Company for Establishing Companies.”
skip - Inside the Panama Papers
Reached by telephone, Maor stated that Mossack Fonseca informed its Israeli branch last week that files had been stolen after its computer systems were breached. “Any information you use [from these files] is like using stolen data,” he said, refusing to give further comment.
The leaked files mention Sapir Holdings, a company registered in 2002 in the Virgin Islands. The owner and its only director was top-ranking lawyer Jacob Weinroth. He was indicted for money laundering in late 2009 and acquitted two years later of all charges against him. During the trial, it emerged that the company had received 30 million shekels ($7.95 million) for services rendered from Uzbek-Israeli entrepreneur Michael Cherney and Russian-Israeli businessman Arcady Gaydamak.
The fraudulent real estate deal of 2002 with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate was also brought up in the trail. The failed deal, in which expensive lands in Jerusalem were offered to the State of Israel for a 999-year lease, was intended to be carried out by Christian Lands of Israel, a company created by Mossack Fonseca, which Weinroth represented. Company documents, like those requesting power of attorney for Weinroth, are among those found in the leaked files.
Another top Israeli lawyer who appears in the Mossack Fonseca documents is Dov Weisglass, who was also Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s bureau chief. Weisglass’s business partner, attorney Assaf Halkin, registered four companies through the Panamanian legal firm. Weisglass was the sole owner of one of these companies, Talaville Global, which was registered in the British Virgin Islands in May 2012. Its declared goal, according to the company’s registration form, was promoting real estate deals in Eastern Europe. Seven months later, all of Talaville Global’s shares were mortgaged against a loan from Vienna-based Raiffeisen Bank.
Dov Weisglass.Nir Keidar
In response to a Haaretz inquiry, Weisglass and Halkin explained that the company “was registered for the purpose of receiving a loan from the bank in order to invest in European properties. The bank would only allow a loan to a corporation. They added that the “company activity is reported to the tax authorities in Israel. The required tax on the said activity is paid in Israel.”
Another business that Halkin established abroad is GFI Technologies. It was registered in May 2013 in the island of Anguilla in order to invest in Albanian high-tech companies. According to records, Halkin, an Albanian citizen named Ismail Mulati and a Canadian firm called Global Fluids International S.A. are the company’s owners. Halkin did not respond to an inquiry by Haaretz regarding what kinds of investments the company made, if any, but commented that the goal of the company is “selling fuel technology.” He added that “all of the Israeli shareholders’ revenue is reported to Israeli tax authorities.”
Although most of the Israeli public is unfamiliar with his name, one of the prominent Israeli businessmen appearing in the leaked documents is Jacob Engel. He is primarily active in African mining through the Elenilto and Engelinvest Groups. Last year TheMarker reported that Elenilto won the government of Togo’s international tender for constructing and developing a phosphate mine and fertilizer factory that would cost $1.4 billion. Elenilto won a huge tender in 2010 for an iron ore mine in Liberia, but sold the concession after a year and a-half to India’s Sesa Goa company for $90 million.
The Engelinvest Group registered five companies through Mossack Fonseca. Engel, or companies he owns, directly controls some of them. However, the connection is more blurred with some of the companies. For example, in 2012 Engelinvest registered a company called TDNN in Anguilla, whose only owner and director was Col. (res.) Olivier Rapowitz. The company’s declared goal was mining activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rapowitz, who in recent years served as an emissary of the Jewish National Fund in Belgium, refused to respond to a Haaretz inquiry on the matter.
Israel Corporation controlling shareholder Idan Ofer.Bloomberg
Another company registered by Engelinvest in Anguilla is Irisgianman. Besides the registration itself, it is hard to identify the connection between the subsidiary and the parent company. The goal of the new company, which was established in October 2011, is mining activity in Ethiopia. Its shareholders, according to the registration documents, are two Israelis, one named Iris Levenstein and the other identified as Y., and Valona Giancarlo, an Italian national residing in Addis Ababa.
Levenstein told Haaretz that although she is registered as a shareholder, she has nothing to do with the activities of the company. “The shares are registered in my name, but they are not mine,” she said. “They are held by Y.” In response to a Haaretz inquiry, Levenstein added that the shares are registered for “historic reasons,” but did not elucidate further. Haaretz was unable to locate Y. before press time, and Jacob Engel refused to comment.
Israeli businessman Idan Ofer is also mentioned in connection to some of the companies in the documents. In 2008 he was appointed the sole director and shareholder of a company called Golden Glade Properties Ltd, which was established in the British Virgin Islands. The name of the company was later changed to Golden Aviation, and Ofer was replaced by John Frank Megginson and David Upton Tugman as co-directors and president and vice president, respectively.
According to the documents, Ofer’s shares were transferred in 2013 to Peymas Enterprises, a company which signed a mortgage to purchase a plane with JP Morgan Bank. In addition, Ofer was registered as owner and director of Joleam Ltd, which was registered in 2009 in the British Virgin Islands, as well as Compass Aviation Ltd, which was also registered there in 2008.
Udi Angel.Moti Kimche
Udi Angel, Ofer’s business partner and shareholder in Israel Corp., one of Israel’s largest holding companies, is registered as company director. Ofer’s spokesperson did not respond to questions about his holdings in these companies, nor about their operations.
There are many correspondences linking Bank Leumi to the Panama-based law firm. Most of them discuss Bank Leumi’s branch in Jersey in the Channel Islands, which provides a tax shelter to its customers. This is the same island on which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a bank account with the local branch of The Royal Bank of Scotland. There are also messages to clerks in various Israeli banks who manage their clients’ affairs in tax shelters or keep in touch with Israeli lawyers who represent them. Last October, Bank Leumi announced that it was closing the Jersey branch.
Bank Leumi is in a vulnerable position on the subject of international taxation after being investigated by U.S. tax authorities last December. The bank was forced to pay a 1.5 billion shekel fine for assisting American clients in income tax evasion. The investigation was not connected to the bank’s Jersey branch.
One of the Israeli customers of Leumi’s Jersey branch is billionaire Teddy Sagi, who made his fortune developing online gambling technology in England and other places worldwide. Sagi lives between Israel and England. In recent years he has developed Camden Market as a commercial real estate space. Sagi is registered as the sole shareholder of at least 16 offshore companies established through Mossack Fonseca, most of which deal with real estate.
Entrepreneur and investor Teddy Sagi.Nick Clarke
Bank Leumi’s Jersey branch provides services to a number of these companies. Documents reveal that some of the branch’s officers also serve on the board of directors of some of Sagi’s offshore companies.
Darren Toudic and Chris Lees are both defined, according to emails, as board members of Bank Leumi’s Jersey branch. Lees is also on the board of directors of Meadow Property. Toudic serves on the board of the Camden Market Holding Corporation, which, based on its name, one can assume is connected to the Camden project.
Another correspondence related to the branch describes social and business meetings between people from Mossack Fonseca and bank representatives. During golf games or barbecues, they discussed the bank’s deals with the Panamanian law firm.
Associates of Teddy Sagi said that the he did not establish the companies, but purchased them. As for the board members, the associates said that their activities were part of the services provided by Bank Leumi.
Bank Leumi said that its Jersey branch was operating within the law and regulation as required by the Jersey Financial Services Commission. "Naturally, we are unable to address specific costumer issues due to banking confidentiality," a representative said in reponse. Bank Leumi also noted that the sale of the operations of the Jersey branch was a "part of the bank's policy to diminish its international activity."
read more: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JeQtcbjIFugJ:www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.712497+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=gt
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/world/europe/panama-papers-iceland.html?_r=0
Iceland’s Prime Minister Steps Down Amid Panama Papers Scandal
LONDON — The revelation of vast wealth hidden by politicians and powerful figures across the globe set off criminal investigations on at least two continents on Tuesday, forced leaders from Europe to Asia to beat back calls for their removal and claimed its first political casualty — pressuring the prime minister of Iceland to step down.
Public outrage over millions of documents leaked from a boutique Panamanian law firm — now known as the Panama Papers — wrenched attention away from wars and humanitarian crises, as harsh new light was shed on the elaborate ways wealthy people hide money in secretive shell companies and offshore tax shelters.
The repercussions have come quickly. In Iceland, Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, confronted by demands for his resignation after documents revealing that he and his wealthy wife had set up a company in the British Virgin Islands led to accusations of a conflict of interest, asked his deputy to take over on Tuesday.
In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron faced calls for a government inquiry and accusations of bald hypocrisy by championing financial transparency — when the leaks showed that his family held undisclosed wealth in tax havens offshore.
In Pakistan, where roughly 20 percent of the population live on less than $1.25 a day, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif angrily rebuffed opposition calls to resign, defended his riches as legally acquired, and demanded that his opponents back up their allegations of wrongdoing. His daughter said on Twitter to critics: “prove or apologize.”
Officials in France, Germany, Austria and South Korea said they were beginning investigations into possible malfeasance, from money laundering to tax evasion. France’s finance minister, Michel Sapin, told Parliament the government was putting Panama back on a blacklist of havens for tax evaders.
The leaked papers cover nearly 215,000 companies and 14,153 clients of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Shared with reporters at 100 news media outlets working in 25 languages, the documents include politicians, celebrities, sports figures and close associates of some of the world’s most powerful people, like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and members of China’s ruling Politburo.
In China, where the figures identified in the leaked papers include a brother-in-law of President Xi Jinping, the government denounced reports about them as a groundless attack. Its media censors purged mentions of Panama and blocked Internet search inquiries with that word.
And in Russia, where officials also dismissed the leaked documents as a baseless political attack on Mr. Putin, the prosecutor general’s office said Tuesday it would look into the reports that high-profile Russian individuals were beneficiaries of offshore companies.
The ripple effects from the documents extended across continents, from a West African diamond mogul to relatives of a former South Korean president and soccer celebrities in Latin America. Even the Chilean head of Transparency International, a prominent anticorruption advocacy group, was forced to step down after his name appeared in the leaked papers as an agent for offshore companies in the Bahamas.
None of the published leaks have identified American officials so far. Nor do they necessarily show evidence of crimes. But anger and reproach about the revelations have started to swell nonetheless.
“Corruption, whether private or public, is enabled by secrecy,” said John Marti, a former federal prosecutor who is a partner at the international law firm Dorsey and Whitney, based in New York. The revelations, he said, are “kind of pulling back the curtain on the secrecy that exists.”
President Obama, while not commenting directly on the leaked documents, said money shielded by tax avoidance “is a huge problem” and could be in the trillions of dollars.
“A lot of this stuff is legal, not illegal,” Mr. Obama said. “And unless the United States and other countries lead by example in closing some of these loopholes and provisions, then in many cases you can trace what’s taking place but you can’t stop it.”
Gabriel Zucman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “The Hidden Wealth of Nations,” said in an interview with National Public Radio that the Panamanian law firm represents a fraction of the total in riches obscured from public scrutiny.
“You know, it’s just one firm in one tax haven, and there is much more going on,” Mr. Zucman said, calculating that about 8 percent of the world’s financial wealth is held in tax havens. “So that’s about $7.6 trillion today, a huge amount of wealth.”
It was not immediately clear how Mr. Gunnlaugsson’s decision to step aside would affect Iceland, a tiny island nation of 323,000 that is still recovering from the global financial crisis eight years ago. A new election remains a possibility......
LONDON — The revelation of vast wealth hidden by politicians and powerful figures across the globe set off criminal investigations on at least two continents on Tuesday, forced leaders from Europe to Asia to beat back calls for their removal and claimed its first political casualty — pressuring the prime minister of Iceland to step down.
Public outrage over millions of documents leaked from a boutique Panamanian law firm — now known as the Panama Papers — wrenched attention away from wars and humanitarian crises, as harsh new light was shed on the elaborate ways wealthy people hide money in secretive shell companies and offshore tax shelters.
The repercussions have come quickly. In Iceland, Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, confronted by demands for his resignation after documents revealing that he and his wealthy wife had set up a company in the British Virgin Islands led to accusations of a conflict of interest, asked his deputy to take over on Tuesday.
In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron faced calls for a government inquiry and accusations of bald hypocrisy by championing financial transparency — when the leaks showed that his family held undisclosed wealth in tax havens offshore.
In Pakistan, where roughly 20 percent of the population live on less than $1.25 a day, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif angrily rebuffed opposition calls to resign, defended his riches as legally acquired, and demanded that his opponents back up their allegations of wrongdoing. His daughter said on Twitter to critics: “prove or apologize.”
Officials in France, Germany, Austria and South Korea said they were beginning investigations into possible malfeasance, from money laundering to tax evasion. France’s finance minister, Michel Sapin, told Parliament the government was putting Panama back on a blacklist of havens for tax evaders.
The leaked papers cover nearly 215,000 companies and 14,153 clients of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Shared with reporters at 100 news media outlets working in 25 languages, the documents include politicians, celebrities, sports figures and close associates of some of the world’s most powerful people, like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and members of China’s ruling Politburo.
In China, where the figures identified in the leaked papers include a brother-in-law of President Xi Jinping, the government denounced reports about them as a groundless attack. Its media censors purged mentions of Panama and blocked Internet search inquiries with that word.
And in Russia, where officials also dismissed the leaked documents as a baseless political attack on Mr. Putin, the prosecutor general’s office said Tuesday it would look into the reports that high-profile Russian individuals were beneficiaries of offshore companies.
The ripple effects from the documents extended across continents, from a West African diamond mogul to relatives of a former South Korean president and soccer celebrities in Latin America. Even the Chilean head of Transparency International, a prominent anticorruption advocacy group, was forced to step down after his name appeared in the leaked papers as an agent for offshore companies in the Bahamas.
None of the published leaks have identified American officials so far. Nor do they necessarily show evidence of crimes. But anger and reproach about the revelations have started to swell nonetheless.
“Corruption, whether private or public, is enabled by secrecy,” said John Marti, a former federal prosecutor who is a partner at the international law firm Dorsey and Whitney, based in New York. The revelations, he said, are “kind of pulling back the curtain on the secrecy that exists.”
President Obama, while not commenting directly on the leaked documents, said money shielded by tax avoidance “is a huge problem” and could be in the trillions of dollars.
“A lot of this stuff is legal, not illegal,” Mr. Obama said. “And unless the United States and other countries lead by example in closing some of these loopholes and provisions, then in many cases you can trace what’s taking place but you can’t stop it.”
Gabriel Zucman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “The Hidden Wealth of Nations,” said in an interview with National Public Radio that the Panamanian law firm represents a fraction of the total in riches obscured from public scrutiny.
“You know, it’s just one firm in one tax haven, and there is much more going on,” Mr. Zucman said, calculating that about 8 percent of the world’s financial wealth is held in tax havens. “So that’s about $7.6 trillion today, a huge amount of wealth.”
It was not immediately clear how Mr. Gunnlaugsson’s decision to step aside would affect Iceland, a tiny island nation of 323,000 that is still recovering from the global financial crisis eight years ago. A new election remains a possibility...............
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