Start / The paradise fiscal
THE PARADISE FISCAL
Tax havens hide at least 12 trillion dollars, 10% of world GDP and at the Spanish level some €144,000 million, 12% of Spanish GDP in 2018.
There are at least 54 jurisdictions on the planet: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Bermuda, Brunei, Dominica, Fiji, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Cai Islands Cook Islands, Falkland Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, Solomon Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, British Virgin Islands, US Virgin Islands, Jersey, Jordan, Lebanon, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Macao, Mauritius, Monaco, Montserrat, Nauru, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Seychelles and Vanuatu, Andorra, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Hong Kong, Marshall Islands, Maldives, Niue, Panama and Saint Kitts, Nevis, Aruba, Cyprus, Curaçao, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Samoa, Singapore, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago.
They are characterized by:
- No or little taxation.
- An opacity in the operations, that is, it is not known who the true owners of the companies or of the deposits to the banks are because they use front men and the fiscal institutions or the Governments cannot investigate the operations carried out or their true identity.
It is not difficult to imagine how many operations classified as illegal can be carried out with these conditions:
- Money laundering
You simply go in a suitcase with money, open an account in your name or through an intermediary front man or an offshore company also with a front man, since there is bank secrecy, then you can transfer them to your account in your country and everything is legal.
- Evade taxes
Making an intermediary company in international purchases.
The offshore company first buys from the supplying company at a certain price and then sells what it bought to the company in Spain and thus the Spanish company that owns the two companies only pays the taxes on the last purchase and not on the purchase made by the offshore company, since offshore companies do not pay taxes.
Making an intermediary company to make investments.
A Bank creates an offshore company where it deposits money that it later invests in stock securities, shares, bonds, or investment funds, since the company pays taxes in the country where it is and this is a tax haven, it does not pay taxes
- Put invented money
But given that current accounts are numbers inside a computer, why not increase those numbers as much as we want but that goes unnoticed? Because it only requires the Bank to do so and the economic authorities in charge of monitoring the activity of the Banks do not give importance to it, because curiously many of these tax havens are located on small islands, very far from the countries that do monitor bank checking accounts.
That is to say, what is illegal to do in the Banks of a country, it is not if you use a tax havens.
The curious thing is that companies and individuals are allowed to trade in tax havens, when it is only a matter of prohibiting all processing with these places.
INFORMATION SOURCES
https://financialred.com/dinero-espanoles-paraisos-fiscales/
https://forbes.es/empresas/10095/como-funciona-un-paraiso-fiscal/
https://www.eldiario.es/economia/oxfam-inversion-espanola-paraisos-fiscales_1_5866712.html
https://cincodias.elpais.com/cincodias/2018/04/18/midinero/1524066760_989983.html
https://santandertrade.com/es/portal/establecerse-extranjero/espana/fiscalidad