Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [8]
Tax havens don’t just offer an escape from tax. They also provide wealthy and powerful elites with secrecy and all manner of ways to shrug off the laws and duties that come along with living in and obtaining benefits from society—taxes, prudent financial regulation, criminal laws, inheritance rules, and many others. Offering these escape routes is the tax havens’ core line of business. It is what they do.
Before getting into the real story of offshore, this chapter will lay some basic groundwork for understanding tax havens, offering a few essential principles, some brief history, and a short overview of where the tax havens are located.
Nobody agrees exactly what a tax haven is, but I will offer a loose description here: It is a place that seeks to attract money by offering politically stable facilities to help people or entities get around the rules, laws, and regulations of jurisdictions elsewhere.5 This definition is quite broad, compared to some others, and I have chosen it for two main reasons. First, I aim to challenge a common idea that it is perfectly OK for one jurisdiction to exercise its sovereign right to get rich by undermining the sovereign laws and rules of other places. Second, I am offering a lens through which to view the history of the modern world. This definition will help me show how the offshore system is not just a colorful appendage at the fringes of the global economy but rather lies at its very center.
I should also make a short point here about some confusion in the language. When I say “offshore,” I obviously am not referring to offshore oil drilling. I am also not talking about “offshoring,” which is what happens when a company moves a manufacturing plant or, say, a call center from the United States to India or China, perhaps to save on labor costs. When I say “offshore,” I am talking about the artificial movement or use of money across borders, and about the jurisdictions, commonly known as tax havens, that host and facilitate this activity. Once the money has escaped offshore, it is reclassified in an accountant’s ledger and it assumes a different identity—and that means, very often, that the forces of law and order will never find it.
A number of features help us spot tax havens. Here are some important ones.
First, as my colleagues have found through painstaking research, all tax havens offer secrecy, in various forms. The term secrecy jurisdiction emerged in the United States in the late 1990s, and in this book I will use it interchangeably with tax haven. I will call the whole global structure of these places, and the private infrastructure that services them, the offshore system.
Another common marker for tax havens is very low or zero taxes, of course. People and corporations use them to escape tax, legally or illegally. Secrecy jurisdictions also have very large financial services industries in comparison to the size of the local economy. These places also routinely “ring-fence” their own economies from the facilities they offer to protect themselves from their own offshore tricks. So they might, for example, offer a zero tax rate to nonresidents who park their money there but tax local residents fully. This ring-fencing is a tacit admission that what they do is harmful.
Various other telltale signs exist. Tax havens usually deny what they are and strenuously assert that they are clean. Search for “We are not a tax haven” on the Internet or “We are a transparent, well regulated, and cooperative jurisdiction,” and see what comes up. Each has its own way of addressing the critics: In the Cayman Islands, for example, accusations of lax regulation after scandals are routinely dismissed as media stereotypes that do not correspond to objective reality.6
But there is one feature of a secrecy jurisdiction that stands out above all: that local politics is captured by financial interests from elsewhere (sometimes these financial interests are criminal interests). This is why I include “politically stable” in my definition: Meaningful opposition