Tiny British Virgin Islands has big role in leaked documents
Source: Associated Press
Tiny British Virgin Islands has big role in leaked documents
Ben Fox and Kenneth Silva, Associated Press
Updated 12:48 pm, Saturday, April 9, 2016
TORTOLA, British Virgin Islands (AP) — A thriving financial services industry that evolved over the last 30 years in the British Virgin Islands made it one of the most popular places in the world to form a corporation, turning a sleepy cluster of Caribbean islands into a global hub of finance.
Now the British Virgin Islands has come under scrutiny like never before thanks to the leak of confidential documents from a Panama-based law firm that specializes in offshore finance.
More than half the 200,000 offshore companies set up by the Mossack Fonseca law firm, including ones owned by the father of British Prime Minister David Cameron and relatives of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, were registered in the BVI, according to reports coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
BVI officials have sought in recent days to address the reports while defending financial oversight in a territory where incorporated entities outnumber residents by a ratio of more than 10-to-1 and blue-suited lawyers and bankers on the streets of Tortola often outnumber tourists.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/world/article/Tiny-British-Virgin-Islands-has-big-role-in-7238258.php
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President Xi Jinping is finding and prosecuting banksters and crooks who use government office to profit friends and family. Xi even busted the former Chinese internal security chief Zhou Yongkang, sort of a cross between J Edgar Hoover and Zapata Petroleum.
Xi cages big tiger in anti-corruption drive
Few will shed tears over the arrest of former Chinese security chief Zhou Yongkang
Carrie Gracie
BBC, Dec. 6, 2014
EXCERPT...
All China's recent leaders have agreed that curing corruption is life and death for the party, but Xi Jinping's campaign is the most significant effort to tackle it.
Sixty-five years ago, many Chinese welcomed the Communist Party because they saw it as less corrupt and more committed to social justice than the Nationalist government that went before. Now China is one of the most unequal societies in the world and the party is widely reviled as a machine for the self-enrichment of those who control it.
SNIP...
He has promised zero tolerance of corruption among party officials, warning that he is going after "both the tigers and the flies", villains from the top to the bottom of the system. Arresting Zhou Yongkang is caging the biggest tiger.
SNIP...
And despite another of President Xi's favourite themes, the rule of law, other rules clearly take precedence over judicial process. Neither Zhou Yongkang nor any of those associated with him have been seen in the past year. They simply disappeared. So it is with hundreds of others. The anti-corruption campaign is being run by the party's internal investigation unit. It is warning of a wave of new arrests to come.
Some doubt whether this approach can work in the long run. The Berlin-based group Transparency International, which compiles a global corruption ranking, notes that perceptions of corruption have worsened this year despite the high profile eradication campaign. It says China needs permanent and systematic changes including better whistle-blower protection and freedom of the press.
CONTINUED...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30358060
Sure wish we had some kind of anti-corruption campaign going on here in the USA.
