#offshores — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #offshores, aggregated by home.social.
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"Revised EU law now dictates that anyone who can demonstrate a “legitimate interest” in a company’s ownership, including journalists, should be able to get the data they need. But with each member state enforcing its own set of often opaque rules, the reality is an arduous slog. In many countries, reporters must justify their interest on a case-by-case basis, battling different application portals, obscure bureaucratic inboxes, nationality requirements, and burdensome demands for justification, such as Ireland requiring evidence of criminal proceedings against the requested company, or the Czech Republic demanding a judicial order.
In theory, this mess should soon be cleaned up. By July, the European Commission is requiring EU member states to adopt a common set of standards that clarify what exactly counts as “legitimate interest,” and to grant journalists, civil society organizations, and other groups generalized access that doesn’t require repeated permission-seeking.
But with just months to go, the Commission has yet to even issue the guidance for how the new system is supposed to work.
“Until the European Commission issues a standard template on how legitimate interest access should work in practice, the implementation deadline will likely be delayed,” said Hugh Jorgensen, Programme Lead on Corrupt Money Flows at Transparency International, an international watchdog group that has long advocated for greater corporate transparency. "
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“The amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1 percent exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity (4.1 billion people), according to a new Oxfam analysis published on April 2, 2026, ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers.
The findings show that, a decade later, the super-rich continue to exploit offshore systems to evade taxes and conceal assets, highlighting the urgent need for coordinated international action to tax extreme wealth and end the use of tax havens.
An amount of $3.55 trillion in untaxed wealth was stashed offshore in tax havens and unreported accounts in 2024, according to Oxfam’s estimates. “This sum exceeds the GDP of France and is more than twice the combined GDP of the world’s 44 least developed countries,” a statement by Oxfam noted.“
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“The amount of untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1 percent exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity (4.1 billion people), according to a new Oxfam analysis published on April 2, 2026, ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Panama Papers.
The findings show that, a decade later, the super-rich continue to exploit offshore systems to evade taxes and conceal assets, highlighting the urgent need for coordinated international action to tax extreme wealth and end the use of tax havens.
An amount of $3.55 trillion in untaxed wealth was stashed offshore in tax havens and unreported accounts in 2024, according to Oxfam’s estimates. “This sum exceeds the GDP of France and is more than twice the combined GDP of the world’s 44 least developed countries,” a statement by Oxfam noted.“
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"The broader point is this: offshore finance allows elites to insulate themselves from the risks of weak governance without having to fix it themselves. Rather than push for judicial reform, more transparent institutions, or limits on executive power, they can arbitrage the rule of law. They don’t need better laws at home if they can choose better ones abroad.
Because not everyone gets to play the offshore shell game, we then have a bifurcated legal system between economic elites and everyone else. And that doesn’t just suck normatively. It’s empirically damaging. Rule of law is one of the strongest correlates with economic growth.
These potentially debilitating political effects of offshore finance are the main reason I decided to spend the last 10 years studying how oligarchs resolve their legal troubles abroad. But I’m certainly not the only one to think this matters. mentions this potential de-democratizing effect in his monumental book on global inequality, while Katharina Pistor postulates an analogous logic in her legal scholarship. Sharafutdinova and Dawisha focus on Russian use of the London legal system to draw out these conclusions.
As often happens with emerging ideas, several of us were running down the same track from different academic angles. None of us can be sure we’re right. It is very hard to assess the effects of the rise of tax havens on something as broad as liberal political development. But the clearest test I’ve seen comes from Maxim Ananyev. He shows that more offshore wealth correlates with future weakening of democracy levels."
https://thepriceofpower.substack.com/p/why-arent-the-rich-fighting-against
#TaxHavens #TaxEvasion #Offshores #Billionaires #RuleOfLaw #Democracy