Corruption Document thread

[Isgrimnur]

The Guardian

The world’s biggest businesses, heads of state and global figures in politics, entertainment and sport who have sheltered their wealth in secretive tax havens are being revealed this week in a major new investigation into Britain’s offshore empires.

The details come from a leak of 13.4m files that expose the global environments in which tax abuses can thrive – and the complex and seemingly artificial ways the wealthiest corporations can legally protect their wealth.

The material, which has come from two offshore service providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens, was obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with partners including the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.

The project has been called the Paradise Papers. It reveals:

• Millions of pounds from the Queen’s private estate has been invested in a Cayman Islands fund – and some of her money went to a retailer accused of exploiting poor families and vulnerable people.
• Extensive offshore dealings by Donald Trump’s cabinet members, advisers and donors, including substantial payments from a firm co-owned by Vladimir Putin’s son-in-law to the shipping group of the US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross.
• How Twitter and Facebook received hundreds of millions of dollars in investments that can be traced back to Russian state financial institutions.
• The tax-avoiding Cayman Islands trust managed by the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s chief moneyman.

...
The disclosures will put pressure on world leaders, including Trump and the British prime minister, Theresa May, who have both pledged to curb aggressive tax avoidance schemes.

The publication of this investigation, for which more than 380 journalists have spent a year combing through data that stretches back 70 years, comes at a time of growing global income inequality.

[Isgrimnur]

Luanda is the capital of Angola

Luanda Leaks

As Isabel dos Santos tells it, she made her massive fortune through business acumen, grit and entrepreneurial spirit.

A global business celebrity, she is a regular presence in elite boardrooms and at such star-studded venues as the Cannes Film Festival. The eldest daughter of a former Angolan guerrilla-turned-autocrat also presents herself as the face of a new Africa.

The Luanda Leaks investigation tells a dramatically different story about how Isabel dos Santos became Africa’s richest woman.

A leaked trove of financial and business records reveals the inside story: how she moved hundreds of millions of dollars in public money out of one of the poorest countries on the planet and into a labyrinth of companies and subsidiaries, many of them in offshore secrecy jurisdictions around the world. The records also show how Western financial firms, lawyers, accountants and government officials — from Lisbon to London and Luanda, from Malta to Dubai — were only too happy to help.
...
The Luanda Leaks investigation reveals:

• Two decades of insider deals that made dos Santos Africa’s wealthiest woman and left oil- and diamond-rich Angola one of the poorest countries on Earth.
• A web of more than 400 companies and subsidiaries in 41 countries linked to dos Santos or her husband, Sindika Dokolo, including 94 in secrecy jurisdictions like Malta, Mauritius and Hong Kong.
• That a cadre of Western business advisors, including name-brand accountancies, consultants and lawyers, moved money, set up companies, audited accounts, suggested ways to avoid taxes and turned a blind eye to red flags that experts say should have raised serious concern.
• How two firms, PwC and Boston Consulting Group, together earned more than $5.6 million from 2010 to 2017 for services provided to dos Santos and Dokolo companies.

[Isgrimnur]

Oil Price

The manager of the account of Angola’s state oil firm Sonangol at a Portuguese bank was found dead in Lisbon on Wednesday, just before he was named as a suspect in an embezzlement case against the former head of Sonangol, Isabel dos Santos, daughter of the former Angolan president and believed to be Africa’s richest woman.

The bank manager, Nuno Ribeiro da Cunha, 45, was found on Wednesday at one of his homes in Lisbon, Portuguese media reported on Thursday, quoting sources at the police.

According to one of those sources, “everything points to suicide.”

Cunha reportedly attempted suicide earlier this month and was suffering from depression, the BBC reports, quoting Portuguese media.

Cunha was the head of private banking at small Portuguese bank EuroBic, in which Isabel dos Santos is believed to have been the main shareholder.