Biggest leak in history of data journalism just went live, about corruption. Edward Snowden Twitter

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FIFA's ethics judge just resigned after being named in the Panama Papers

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One of the world's most famous soccer stars was named in the Panama Papers

Uruguay alleges ex-FIFA vice president 'took $50,000 a month in bribes' from sports-marketing companies
Under suspicion in the fallout from the global offshore accounts investigation, Uruguayan lawyer Juan Pedro Damiani resigned as a FIFA ethics judge on Wednesday.

Damiani was already under investigation by FIFA ethics prosecutors after being identified on Sunday in a vast leak of data from a Panama law firm specializing in tax avoidance schemes which can be exploited for money laundering.

His exit, after helping to ban former FIFA president Sepp Blatter from soccer last December, damages the scandal-hit world soccer body's efforts to rebuild its image and reputation under new leadership.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-fifa-ethics-judge-damiani-resigns-while-under-suspicion-2016-4

 

[Dale00]

A Clinton - Kremlin connection emerges:

The revelations of the so-called Panama Papers that are roiling the world’s political and financial elites this week include important facts about Team Clinton. This unprecedented trove of documents purloined from a shady Panama law firm that arranged tax havens, and perhaps money laundering, for the globe’s super-rich includes juicy insights into how Russia’s elite hides its ill-gotten wealth.

Almost lost among the many revelations is the fact that Russia’s biggest bank uses The Podesta Group as its lobbyist in Washington, D.C. Though hardly a household name, this firm is well known inside the Beltway, not least because its CEO is Tony Podesta, one of the best-connected Democratic machers in the country. He founded the firm in 1998 with his brother John, formerly chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, then counselor to President Barack Obama, Mr. Podesta is the very definition of a Democratic insider. Outsiders engage the Podestas and their well-connected lobbying firm to improve their image and get access to Democratic bigwigs.

Which is exactly what Sberbank, Russia’s biggest financial institution, did this spring. As reported at the end of March, the Podesta Group registered with the U.S. Government as a lobbyist for Sberbank, as required by law, naming three Podesta Group staffers: Tony Podesta plus Stephen Rademaker and David Adams, the last two former assistant secretaries of state. It should be noted that Tony Podesta is a big-money bundler for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign while his brother John is the chairman of that campaign, the chief architect of her plans to take the White House this November....

... A NATO counterintelligence official explained that Sberbank, which has outposts in almost two dozen foreign countries, “functions as a sort of arm of the SVR outside Russia, especially because many of its senior employees are ‘former’ Russian intelligence officers.” Inside the country, Sberbank has an equally cosy relationship with the Federal Security Service or FSB, Russia’s powerful domestic intelligence agency.

Ukraine has pointed a finger at Sberbank as an instrument of Russia’s aggression against their country. In 2014, Ukraine’s Security Service charged Sberbank with “financing terrorism,” noting that its branches were distributing millions of dollars in illegal aid to Russian-backed separatists fighting in eastern Ukraine. Kyiv’s conclusion, that Sberbank is a witting supporter of Russian aggression against Ukraine, is broadly supported by Western intelligence. “Sberbank is the Kremlin, they don’t do anything major without Putin’s go-ahead, and they don’t tell him ‘no’ either,” explained a retired senior U.S. intelligence official with extensive experience in Eastern Europe.

In addition, Ukrainian intelligence has alleged that the FSB collaborated with Sberbank in the bombings of two of the bank’s branches in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in June 2015. The attacks caused no casualties but got major coverage in Russian state media as “proof” of Ukraine’s instability and violent anti-Russian nature. Although the notion that Russian spies would plant bombs as a provocation, what the Kremlin terms provokatsiya, may sound outlandish to those unacquainted with espionage, in fact Russian spies have been doing such things since tsarist times. What I’ve termed “fake terrorism” is a longstanding Kremlin core competency, and it can only be pulled off with logistical support, including with finances.

Predictably, Sberbank has blown off the Panama Papers revelations as nothing of consequence, but the fact that they are an arm of the Kremlin and they do plenty of shady things in many countries is a matter of record. As is the fact that the Podesta Group is their lobbyist in America.

Among the Sberbank subsidiaries that the Podesta Group also represents are the Cayman Islands-based Troika Dialog Group Limited, the Cyprus-based SBGB Cyprus Limited, and the Luxembourg-based SB International. As reported this week by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a consortium of journalists exploring the Panama Papers leak, Sberbank and Troika Dialog are used by members of Mr. Putin’s inner circle to shift public funds into sometimes questionable private investments. In other words, this is top-level money laundering of a brazen kind. As the OCCRP stated plainly, “Some of these companies were initially connected to the Troika Dialog investment fund, which was controlled and run by Sberbank after the bank bought the Troika Dialog investment bank. Troika and Sberbank declined to comment.”

Adding to shadiness of all this, the Podesta Group is playing along with the useful charade that Sberbank is simply a private financial institution, rather than the state-owned bank that it is, since that would require the lobbyists to register as agents of the Russian government under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

John and Tony Podesta aren’t fooling anyone with this ruse. They are lobbyists for Vladimir Putin’s personal bank of choice, an arm of his Kremlin and its intelligence services. Since the brothers Podesta are presumably destined for very high-level White House jobs next January if the Democrats triumph in November at the polls, their relationship with Sberbank is something they—and Hillary Clinton—need to explain to the public.

http://observer.com/2016/04/panama-papers-reveal-clintons-kremlin-connection/

 

[Ace_on_the_Turn]

Nah. As long as the EBT cards work and the WIC, housing subsidies get paid for the month, nothing happens.
You forget, basketball on tonight, Dancing with the Stars on deck and the Bachelor is starting a new season. Kardashions butt will get botox and Kytelyn Jenner will go the other way and have it reattached. The US sheep have plenty on their plate to keep from being informed.

Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk

You seem very well informed as to what the sheep are watching.

 

[Ace_on_the_Turn]

Maybe if the US corporate taxes weren't so high, they wouldn't have to hide it overseas. We have one of the highest corporate taxes in the entire world, and some wonder why manufacturing is leaving this country for the third world.

The United States Has the Third Highest Corporate Tax Rate among 173 Nations.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/corporate-income-tax-rates-around-world-2015

Just one more reason manufactures can't do business in this country.
Blame the Kochs, blame the Waltons, lol.
Look at your Government for the cause.

Before you start blaming the government, and I give you some credit for not just straight out blaming Obama, you might check the difference between statutory and effective rates:

The highest individual tax rate in the US is 39.6%. The highest earners pay that rate on very little of their income. Mitt Romney earned $13.5 million in 2010. He paid $1.9 million in income tax. A rate of 14%. Just like Mitt US corporations pay the 35% rate on very little of their income. The effective tax rate of US corporations is much lower than it appears.


Are you hearing that U.S. corporations are taxed much more than their international competitors, making it harder for them to compete in global markets? Those who think so want policymakers to substantially cut corporate income taxes, protect corporate tax loopholes or both. But that claim is highly misleading to begin with, as this recent Wall Street Journal analysis of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's accounting methods illustrates.
First, some background. The U.S. federal corporate tax rate is 35 percent, and that "statutory" rate is what corporate tax critics cite most often. Additional state corporate taxes bump the overall number up closer to 40 percent.
The statutory rate, however, doesn't reflect the write-offs in the tax code (so-called tax expenditures) that reduce the "effective rate" on corporate profits – that is, what corporations actually pay in taxes as a share of their profits. Indeed, while the U.S. statutory rate is about 14 points higher than the average among industrialized countries, the effective rate differential is much smaller, a Congressional Research Service analysis found.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/econo...3/reality-check-on-corporate-income-tax-rates
From Forbes:
It’s a rock-solid fact that the U.S. corporate statutory tax rate is the highest among developed nations and is significantly higher than the average. According to 2014 data from the OECD, the combined federal and state statutory corporate tax rate for the United States is 39.1 percent. The average of the other 33 members of the OECD is 24.8 percent — 14.3 percentage points lower than the U.S. rate. Weighted by country GDP, the average for these 33 countries is 28.3 percent — 10.8 percentage points lower than the U.S. rate. There is, however, an unsettled debate over whether and by how much the U.S. corporate effective tax rate is higher than effective tax rates outside the United States.

Anyone, like Trump, that says the US has the highest corporate tax is being very disingenuous.

 

[Glocktogo]

Before you start blaming the government, and I give you some credit for not just straight out blaming Obama, you might check the difference between statutory and effective rates:

The highest individual tax rate in the US is 39.6%. The highest earners pay that rate on very little of their income. Mitt Romney earned $13.5 million in 2010. He paid $1.9 million in income tax. A rate of 14%. Just like Mitt US corporations pay the 35% rate on very little of their income. The effective tax rate of US corporations is much lower than it appears.


Are you hearing that U.S. corporations are taxed much more than their international competitors, making it harder for them to compete in global markets? Those who think so want policymakers to substantially cut corporate income taxes, protect corporate tax loopholes or both. But that claim is highly misleading to begin with, as this recent Wall Street Journal analysis of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's accounting methods illustrates.
First, some background. The U.S. federal corporate tax rate is 35 percent, and that "statutory" rate is what corporate tax critics cite most often. Additional state corporate taxes bump the overall number up closer to 40 percent.
The statutory rate, however, doesn't reflect the write-offs in the tax code (so-called tax expenditures) that reduce the "effective rate" on corporate profits – that is, what corporations actually pay in taxes as a share of their profits. Indeed, while the U.S. statutory rate is about 14 points higher than the average among industrialized countries, the effective rate differential is much smaller, a Congressional Research Service analysis found.
From Forbes:
It’s a rock-solid fact that the U.S. corporate statutory tax rate is the highest among developed nations and is significantly higher than the average. According to 2014 data from the OECD, the combined federal and state statutory corporate tax rate for the United States is 39.1 percent. The average of the other 33 members of the OECD is 24.8 percent — 14.3 percentage points lower than the U.S. rate. Weighted by country GDP, the average for these 33 countries is 28.3 percent — 10.8 percentage points lower than the U.S. rate. There is, however, an unsettled debate over whether and by how much the U.S. corporate effective tax rate is higher than effective tax rates outside the United States.

Anyone, like Trump, that says the US has the highest corporate tax is being very disingenuous.

I'm interested in your business model. Do you get paid by post count, word count or the number of hotlinked hits you get?

 

[dennishoddy]

I'm interested in your business model. Do you get paid by post count, word count or the number of hotlinked hits you get?

I can link another dozen sites refuting every thing he said. I find it amazing I get praise for not saying Obama caused it, yet in his last sentence he lashes out at Trump.
I just presented the facts produced by The Tax Foundation which is the oldest non-profit tax think tank in the country, founded in 1937. Its stated mission is "to educate taxpayers about sound tax policy and the size of the tax burden borne by Americans at all levels of government." It also argues for a tax system characterized by "simplicity", "neutrality", "stability", "transparency" and "growth-promotion".

 

[Ace_on_the_Turn]

I can link another dozen sites refuting every thing he said. I find it amazing I get praise for not saying Obama caused it, yet in his last sentence he lashes out at Trump.
I just presented the facts produced by The Tax Foundation which is the oldest non-profit tax think tank in the country, founded in 1937. Its stated mission is "to educate taxpayers about sound tax policy and the size of the tax burden borne by Americans at all levels of government." It also argues for a tax system characterized by "simplicity", "neutrality", "stability", "transparency" and "growth-promotion".

Dennis, all I can do is lead you to the body of knowledge. If don't want to drink and instead wallow in willful ignorance, not much can be done for you. I do find it a bit amusing that you're so willing to ignore indisputable facts present to you from a far right, tax-hating, pro-business source.

It's very, very simple. US corporations pay, actually pay, a tax rate that is directly in line with comparable nations.

And to imply that The Tax Foundation, which was created by Alfred Sloan, as some kind of "champion of the people" shows an ignorance that's hard to fathom. You really, really should do at least some research. Alfred Sloan would have called Ayn Rand a lefty.

 

[dennishoddy]

Dennis, all I can do is lead you to the body of knowledge. If don't want to drink and instead wallow in willful ignorance, not much can be done for you. I do find it a bit amusing that you're so willing to ignore indisputable facts present to you from a far right, tax-hating, pro-business source.

It's very, very simple. US corporations pay, actually pay, a tax rate that is directly in line with comparable nations.

And to imply that The Tax Foundation, which was created by Alfred Sloan, as some kind of "champion of the people" shows an ignorance that's hard to fathom. You really, really should do at least some research. Alfred Sloan would have called Ayn Rand a lefty.

Lol, your not leading me anywhere. Remember, Alfred Sloan was in 1937, I see you didn't read past the first paragraph on wiki.

 

[Shadowrider]

So not to get into the mud pit, but in regards to the O/P has there actually been any crime(s) committed? Or is all the hubbub about bashing rich folk for parking their dough overseas to utilize a legal tax shelter? If it's as big as the mantra says, there is no doubt money laundering, and likely a lot of it, going on. But has anybody been actually nabbed yet? For anything illegal? Just curious.

 

[dennishoddy]

So not to get into the mud pit, but in regards to the O/P has there actually been any crime(s) committed? Or is all the hubbub about bashing rich folk for parking their dough overseas to utilize a legal tax shelter? If it's as big as the mantra says, there is no doubt money laundering, and likely a lot of it, going on. But has anybody been actually nabbed yet? For anything illegal? Just curious.

The Prime Minister of Iceland has resigned over it, but he was in trouble anyway on other issues.
Its only got passing interest on the lame stream media in the US because some of its darlings my get hurt.
Britain seems to be heating up now, so I'm sure any real reporting will come from there.