Friday 29th of March 2024

letters from switzerland...

swiss flag
Sovereignty and economic globalization

The sovereign state is indispensable – especially in a globalised economy, by Marianne Wüthrich /


Safeguarding and expanding rights – securing prosperity / US domestic policy sabotages détente with Russia by Hannes Hofbauer /


Words from Helsinki that the world has been waiting for, by Willy Wimmer /


The West’s fury and bitterness about Russia’s successes; Following on from the modest movement towards détente achieved at the Putin-Trump meeting, what next?, by Brian Cloughley /


French major enterprises have to abandon their commercial activities in Iran, by Hayat Gazzane /


Is “Antifa” the German mainstream? This is no way for the country to come to rest, by Karl Müller /


Driving bans for diesel? A plea for more objectivity, by Rainer Schopf /


Why I like to be a Swiss, by Wolfgang van Biezen /


The value of language teaching for the preservation of the ancient languages, by Thibault Mercuzot, Delphine le Corfec and Patrick Beugnet.

 

read:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article202479.html

too big to be fallen...

Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that while its amnesty program for tax cheats is coming to a close, the IRS will continue its decade-long investigation of income tax evasion by tens of thousands of American billionaires and millionaires holding secret offshore accounts in Switzerland or otherwise.  The program’s success, WSJ noted, was partly owned to one UBS bank whistleblower, Bradley Birkenfeld, who exposed his bank’s industrial scale criminality and helped recoup some over $780 million in owed taxes from UBS for the government. 

Birkenfeld was awarded $104 million by the government for his efforts. What was unsaid, however, even more astonishing: they awarded him after sending him to prison for two years. This despite all of his game-changing disclosures, which not only included the massive UBS corruption but helped expose schemes totaling some $17 billion from the most powerful banks in the world.

As we’ve seen with the federal government so many times—no good deed goes unpunished in this town.

An American citizen, Birkenfeld became a senior level employee in 2001 at UBS after several shorter stints at Credit Suisse and Barclays Bank in Geneva. He both witnessed and facilitated income tax evasion by countless one percenters through marketing and managing UBS numbered accounts then protected by Swiss bank secrecy laws. The Swiss banking system was nothing less than an urbane version of organized crime. But it had escaped scrutiny by United States law enforcement authorities. Money talks in politics. And one percenters and Too Big To Fail banks characteristically underwrite political campaigns and politicians.


Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/no-good-deed-goes-unpun...

 

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top of the list...

A new study from advocacy group Tax Justice Network reveals that Switzerland is the world’s most-corrupt country, with a “high secrecy score of 76.” It’s followed by the US and the Cayman Islands.

“Switzerland is the grandfather of the world’s tax havens, one of the world’s largest offshore financial centers, and one of the world’s biggest secrecy jurisdictions or tax havens,” said the group’s report ‘Financial Secrecy Index — 2018 Results’.

It explained that “the Swiss will exchange information with rich countries if they have to, but will continue offering citizens of poorer countries the opportunity to evade their taxpaying responsibilities.

“These factors, along with ongoing aggressive pursuit of financial sector whistleblowers (resorting at times to what appear to be non-legal methods) are ongoing reminders of why Switzerland remains the most important secrecy jurisdiction in the world today,” said the report.

The index ranks countries for the assistance their legal systems provide to money-launderers, and to all people who seek to protect corruptly-obtained wealth. The higher the secrecy score, the more corrupt the government is.

In order to create the index, a secrecy score is combined with a figure representing the size of the offshore financial services industry in each country.

According to the report, the United States’ secrecy score (60) is rising, which results in attracting corrupt wealth. In 2013, the US was in the sixth place, and in 2015 it took the third in the rating.

“The continued rise of the US in the 2018 index comes off the back of a significant change in the US share of the global market for offshore financial services. Between 2015 and 2018 the US increased its market share in offshore financial services by 14 percent,” said the report. In total the US accounts for 22.3 percent of the global market in offshore financial services.

“The US provides a wide array of secrecy and tax-free facilities for non-residents, both at a Federal level and at the level of individual states.”

The report added that “Financial secrecy provided by the US has caused untold harm to the ordinary citizens of foreign countries, whose elites have used the United States as a bolt-hole for looted wealth.”

Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, Germany, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, and Guernsey closed out the top-10 most corrupt countries.

The least corrupt nations among the 112 covered in the rating were San Marino, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Montserrat.

The countries with the lowest secrecy score were UK (42) and Slovenia (42), Belgium (44), Sweden (45), Lithuania (47), Italy (49) and Brazil (49).

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/business/417874-switzerland-us-most-corrupt/

 

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