Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works

Introduction

In September 2007, only a month after the beginning of one of the most devastating financial crises ever experienced, the British bank Northern Rock was on the brink of collapse. Northern Rock had expanded rapidly prior to its failure, funding its growth as an aggressive player in the international market for Collaterized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and emerging as the fifth largest mortgage provider in the UK. However, those CDOs were issued not by Northern Rock itself but by what became known as its shadow company, Granite Master Issuer plc and Associates. What was intriguing about the arrangement was that Granite was owned not by Northern Rock but by a UK charitable trust established by Northern Rock. Much of the management of the resulting, supposedly independent structure was located in Jersey, a well-known European tax haven.

In March 2008 came the collapse of Bear Stearns, a leading U.S. investment bank. Bear Stearns had hemorrhaged money through its hedge funds, many of them registered in the Cayman Islands and Dublin’s International Financial Centre—both well-known offshore finance centers.

That well-known tax havens became embroiled in the financial crisis was not a coincidence. If you think of tax havens as sun-kissed exotic islands reminiscent of the Garden of Eden where a few billionaires, mafiosi, and corrupt autocrats hide their ill-gotten gains, then think again. Tax havens are the underlying constant theme of the financial crisis of 2008–9. Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered a month of financial panic around the world, was registered in Delaware—a state that has served as an internal tax haven in the United States since the late nineteenth century. Lehman’s collapse was followed by the Madoff scandal, a $50 billion ponzi scheme orchestrated by the well-known Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff. It took very little time to discover a link between Madoff’s scam and tax havens. Madoff Spotlight Turns to Role of Offshore Funds, announced the New York Times headline on December 30, 2008.

We do not suggest in this book that tax havens caused the financial crisis of 2008–9, but we do believe that they were one of the most important actors precipitating it. We argue that their regulation is key to any future plan to stabilize financial markets.

We are not alone. The French, German, British, the U.S. governments joined now by the G-20 are all keen to pressure these havens, for the sake of stability and, not unnaturally, for other, more traditional reasons as well. For tax havens are places where one can avoid or evade at least one of life’s absolute certainties, taxes, and so they leave a gaping hole in most state finances. Tax havens also help those who use them escape other regulations, launder money, hide money from partners or spouses, and secure secrecy for their commercial activities.

The French call tax havens paradis fiscaux, financial paradises or financial havens, and it is perhaps a more appropriate term for them, for tax havens involve a wide variety of financial purposes in addition to taxation. In fact, there are slight variations in the translation of the concept in different languages, reflecting subtle differences in their roles and functions. The Spanish think of tax havens as asilos de impuesto, asylums from taxation but, like the French, they also use the term paradisos fiscales; the Italians talk about a rifugio fiscale, a financial refuge. In German tax havens are translated as Steuerhafens, which is the closest to the English meaning of the term, but in Russian they are special tax zones, implying eased tax regimes or tax incentives for capital. International organizations eschew such popular terms in favor of offshore financial centers or even international financial centers, implying that tax havens are no different from other financial centers—which as we demonstrate in this book, they are. Those campaigning for reform now call them secrecy jurisdictions. Such differences in terminology suggest that tax havens are complex, multipurpose phenomena.

The evidence is not difficult to find. If you took a stroll down Monaco’s famous piers and tried to find a yacht that did not fly the flag of one of the principal tax havens discussed in this book—the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Isle of Man, Jersey, or even Luxembourg—you would be hard pushed. Because of the limited regulation typical of tax havens, even landlocked Luxembourg has emerged as one of the largest shipping nations of the world.

Alternatively, check the addresses of the scores of Internet casinos and see if any one of them is not registered in a tax haven. In general, it is clear that tax havens are not only about tax avoidance and evasion: undermining a broad range of regulations is now a significant part of the business model. Nonetheless, low taxation policies remain a core feature of their business.

Individually tax havens may appear small and insignificant, but in combination they play an important role in the world economy. First, they undermine the regulatory and taxation processes of the mainstream states by the provision of what may be described as get out of regulation free cards to banks and other financial institutions, to international business, and to wealthy individuals. Second, in doing so they skew the distribution of costs and benefits of globalization in favor of a global elite and to the detriment of the vast majority of the population. In that sense tax havens are at the very heart of globalization, or at least the heart of the specific type of globalization that we have witnessed since the 1980s.

Yet tax havens are legal entities, for the simple reason that they are sovereign states or suzerain jurisdictions, both of which have the legal right to write their own domestic laws. They may choose to write their tax codes and financial laws in ways that others consider harmful. Legal in this context means allowed under the law, recognized or established by a court of law, or officially permitted. Legality has very little to do with either opinion or ethics. These places are exercising their rights, and their defense is that international law allows them to do so.

We think that blaming tax havens for their sovereign choice of law is a gross oversimplification of the argument. It is a fact that the majority of the tax havens of the world are very small jurisdictions; very few of them possess universities or research centers that teach the skills required to support a thriving global business community; and very few have local resources that would allow them to sustain a high standard of living. Tax havens are financial conduits that, in exchange for a fee, use their one principal asset—their sovereignty—to serve a nonresident constituency of accountants and lawyers, bankers and financiers, who bring a demand for the privileges that tax havens can supply.

As the modern regulatory state took shape toward the end of the nineteenth century, a number of advanced industrialized countries began the long and arduous process of reorganizing their revenue institutions. The state remained an important if still minor player in national economies until the great depression of the 1930s. Over time government outlay as a proportion of Gross National Product (GNP) rose from an average of 10% in the early twentieth century, to an average of 30 to 40% by the beginning of the twenty-first century. Paralleling these developments, tax avoidance and evasion became a topic of considerable interest. Nevertheless, tax havens have remained a specialized topic of interest to lawyers, accountants, and tax specialists. The period of sustained stagflation and the attendant fiscal crisis of the state in the 1970s stimulated renewed interest in tax havens, this time not only as facilitators of tax avoidance and evasion but as emerging financial centers as well (Park 1982; Johns 1983; Johns & Le Marchant 1993). The study of tax havens remained, nonetheless, a secondary area of expertise, and it has made little or no impact on mainstream scholarship. Things have changed dramatically since the late 1990s. Starting with an important Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study of harmful tax competition published in 1998, a number of international financial organizations have made tax havens one of their key priorities. At the same time, a growing number of academics (see box 2.1), as well as journalists, have turned their attention to tax havens, as indeed have civil society organizations. The result has been a veritable explosion of new information and theoretical debates.

This book provides an up-to-date evaluation of the role and function of tax havens in the world economy. It also provides an account of the origins and development of the tax havens of the world from the late nineteenth century through the latest tax havens in post-communist countries, the Middle East, and Africa. In addition, the book offers an up-to-date estimate of the size of the phenomenon, explains the various uses of tax havens, and analyzes the impact of tax havens on the state and business. We conclude the book with the impact of the OECD and Europe an Union attacks on the offshore world and consider what might happen next. Although the literature on tax havens is growing by leaps and bound, this book, to our knowledge, offers the first comprehensive synthesis of the disparate strands of research and knowledge on tax havens.

Our principal contention is that most accepted ideas about tax havens are false. Tax havens are not working on the margins of the world economy, but are an integral part of modern business practice. Furthermore, they exist not in opposition to the state, but in accord with it. Indeed, we take the view that tax havens not only are conduits for tax avoidance and evasion but belong more broadly to the world of finance, to the business of managing the monetary resources of an organization, country, or individuals. They have become one of the most important instruments in the contemporary, globalized financial system, and one of the principal causes of financial instability. Their sovereignty sets them apart, yet it is their sovereignty that gives them the means to integrate themselves into the world on terms they have, at least in part, been able to set for themselves.

Money, Wealth, and Tax Havens

The names of offshore jurisdictions have appeared with monotonous regularity in every financial crisis or scandal that has erupted over the past twenty years—whether financial crises in East Asia, Russia, and Argentina, or the corporate fiascos associated with companies such as Long Term Capital Management, Parmalat, Refco, Enron, and, in the 2008/2009 crisis, Northern Rock, Bear Stearns, and Madoff’s ponzi scheme.

The sense of fiasco perhaps reached its pinnacle when it was revealed in February 2008 that a dog named Günter joined 1,400 of his fellow German citizens (most of the conventional homo sapiens variety) and set up anonymous trusts managed by Liechtenstein’s LGT bank to avoid German taxation (Dinmore and Williamson 2008). In June 2008, an employee of UBS, the premier Swiss bank, pleaded guilty to helping a Russian oligarch evade millions of dollars’ worth of taxes in the United States. In November 2008, a senior Swiss-based employee of the same bank was indicted on charges of tax evasion in the United States. The UBS employee estimated that $20 billion of assets were involved and the total fee income to UBS each year might have amounted to $200 million. UBS reportedly is cooperating with the inquiry (Balzli and Hornig 2008). He stated that UBS chose to ignore regulations with regard to the operation of offshore accounts for its U.S. clients and in the process facilitated tax evasion.

The evidence is clear that tax havens and the tax evasion that at least some of them facilitate are serious business. At some point quantitative growth accumulates to a qualitative change, and the impressive figures associated with tax havens suggest that they play an important if often overlooked role in the contemporary world. We hope that anyone who still believes that tax havens are a mere sideshow, the playground of the rich and famous, will think differently after reading this book.

The statistics are certainly impressive. In our estimate there are between forty-six and sixty active tax havens in the world right now (table 1.4). They are home to an estimated two million international business companies (IBCs)—a term used to describe a bewildering array of corporate entities, most of which are extremely opaque, and thousands (if not millions) of trusts, mutual funds, hedge funds, and captive insurance companies. About 50% of all international banking lending and 30% of the world’s stock of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) are registered in these jurisdictions. Some very small islands are among the world’s largest financial centers: the Caymans, a small set of islands in the Caribbean and a British Overseas Territory, is the fifth-largest international financial center in the world. That list also contains the small British Crown jurisdictions of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, as well as what we call intermediate havens, such as Switzerland, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Singapore.

The global rich—the Richistanis as Frank (2007) calls them—held in 2007 approximately $12 trillion of their wealth in tax havens. It is as if the entire U.S. annual GNP were parked in tax havens.

The hedge fund industry has discovered the delights of tax havens. According to some estimates the big four Caribbean havens—the Caymans Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, and the Bahamas—are home to 52% of the world’s hedge fund industry. But these figures are disputed. The Cayman Financial Services Authority claims that 35% of the world’s hedge fund industry is located in its territory alone (Cayman Islands Monetary Authority figures as reported in GAO 2008), and some cite an improbably high figure of 80% (Zuill 2005). This unresolved debate is disconcerting: it shows how little we really know about the hedge fund industry.

The statistics are staggering, but these are only numbers, and numbers need interpretation, a critical task we undertake in this book. We interpret them from the perspective of a political economist; we aim to decipher the political and social trends embedded in the numbers. We argue that the numbers represent a profound paradox of the modern world And what these figures represent can be captured in one word—avoidance. They are the abstract expression of the collective efforts of the state, corporate, and business elites of the world to avoid the very laws and regulations that they have collectively designed.

Such elites primarily seek to avoid taxation. They seek to avoid or reduce their share in the collective effort that pays for the collective goods provided (or supposedly provided) by states, such as security, economic, political, and social stability, health, education, and infrastructure. However, elites also seek to avoid regulations. The regulations they seek to avoid are often the financial and business rules and norms that states introduced to maintain order and stability—without which the rich would not have gotten so rich in the first place. Tax havens allow people to manage many other, more esoteric social regulations, among them the avoidance of gambling and pornography laws.

Granted, not all taxes and regulations are necessary or socially beneficial. Until the 1970s, most advanced capitalist countries heavily regulated their broadcasting industries, allowing only state-sponsored broadcasting companies to operate. The growth of offshore radio stations such as Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline, both of which operated on the tax haven principle (Palan 2003), appears in retrospect to have been a beneficial development. Once governments realized how popular these offshore stations are, and how futile were their aims of controlling the airwaves, they responded by liberalizing their domestic broadcasting regulations. Here, offshore proved to be a modernizing force compelling governments to abandon intrusive regulations. Broadcasting, however, is uniquely accessible to all. In most cases—indeed, in all the cases discussed in this book—entry barriers to the range of benefits offered by tax havens are high, limiting their clientele to a small and extremely wealthy minority. As a result, unfortunately, tax havens benefit the rich and the powerful, while the costs are largely borne by the rest of society.

When we say that tax havens are at the very heart of globalization, we mean that tax havens are among the most significant, if persistently overlooked, structural factors that are determining the distribution of the benefits and costs of globalization among the world’s peoples. That they skew the benefits of globalization to favor a small minority of the world’s rich and powerful is a matter of high political import.

We can find examples of people taking advantage of collective goods for private plea sure at every level of society, of course, from the poorest to the richest. The tax haven phenomenon is a massive organized attempt by the richest and most powerful to take advantage of collective goods on a scale rarely seen; and it is, perhaps for the first time, taking place globally. Tax havens are, therefore, at the heart of a particular type of globalization—globalization that is characterized by a growing gap between the very rich and everyone else. Such globalization is neither necessary nor inevitable. Rather it is a product of a complex set of factors, key among which has been lenient and forgiving attitudes toward tax havens that have characterized international politics, especially those in which the United States has been involved.

Regulatory Responses

The astonishing statistics associated with tax havens tell us that they have played a central role in skewing developments in the world economy. First, they have helped to undermine the international financial regulatory environment and taxation policies of all those countries and regions that participate in globalization, as well as those that do not. Second, they have served collectively as a vehicle for skewing the allocation of costs and benefits of globalization. The degree to which modern business, large and small, have become embedded in tax havens, while astounding, is rarely acknowledged. An international company or business with no links to tax havens is a rare species nowadays. But the impact of tax havens is felt largely indirectly, revealed through the statistics that show a per sis tent growth in the gap between rich and poor since the 1980s all over the world (see, e.g., Duménil and Lévy 2004). The role that tax havens are playing in undermining financial regulations has come to light only recently.

Yet all this was known for a while. How could the leading industrial countries allow these small jurisdictions to rise and flourish? Well, they did and did not. Countries such as the United States, UK, France, and Germany sought from time to time to close certain loopholes, pressuring this or that tax haven to change some of its rules and policies. There were also some feeble attempts, dating back to the interwar period to try to develop a coordinate international response to tax havens. But frankly, not much was accomplished. Worse, the very same countries, with the possible exception of France and Germany, were major players in the development of the tax haven phenomenon after World War II.

For reasons discussed later in this book the sentiment began to change toward the end of the 1990s. Since then a number of initiatives, led initially by the OECD harmful tax competition campaign, began to gather steam. However, in an excellent detailed analysis, Jason Sharman (2006) exposed these efforts largely as futile. Yet only three years later, it appears that tax havens are under greater threat than ever.

Concern about tax havens has been bubbling for a long time, but the full impact of tax havens on the world economy took a long time to mature and may have dawned first on the leaders of the European Union. While the OECD campaign was largely in the doldrums, the EU has emerged as the effective leader in the global struggle against tax havens—a mantle unlikely to pass to the United States despite the results of the November 2008 election. The issue was certainly known to both the Clinton and the George W. Bush administrations, and the former was one of the drivers of the multilateral efforts against tax havens. But one of the first acts of the Bush administration was to withdraw support from multilateral efforts to combat harmful tax competition. The new Obama administration is an entirely different kettle of fish. As a senator, Barack Obama played an important role in various initiatives to combat tax havens. Once in power, he signaled important changes in policy allying the United States with France and Germany in the fight against tax havens.

The crisis of 2007–9 may prove an important watershed in the evolution of regulatory response to tax havens. We discuss recent developments in the regulatory response to tax havens in the conclusion to this book.

What Are Tax Havens?

It is not easy to define tax havens, and in fact we devote an entire chapter to the subject. At this point we suggest that tax havens are places or countries (not all of them are sovereign states) that have sufficient autonomy to write their own tax, finance, and other laws and regulations. They all take advantage of this autonomy to create legislation designed to assist nonresident persons or corporations to avoid the regulatory obligations imposed on them in the places where those nonresident people undertake the substance of their economic transactions.

An additional characteristic that most tax havens share is an environment of secrecy that allows the user of structures created under local law to do so either completely anonymously, or largely so. The third common characteristic is ease and affordability in gaining access to the entities incorporated in the territory.

Evasion and Avoidance

Tax havens are used, as their name suggests, to avoid and evade taxes. However, these two terms are often confused, and so some clarification is essential at this stage.

Individuals and companies just about anywhere in the world have the opportunity to undertake what might be described as tax planning within the law of the territory in which they live or operate. For the vast majority of the world’s population, including most people in advanced industrialized countries with reasonable wages, the concept of tax planning is largely meaningless: tax is normally deducted at source from earnings, and that is more or less that with regard to the settlement of tax liabilities.

For the wealthy minority of the world’s population and for most companies, tax planning is, in contrast, an important part of their business and personal lives. There is even a special term to describe the life experience of some: they are called PTs, the permanent tourists or those who are for tax purposes the permanently not there (Maurer 1998). This is an extreme, however, and in practice tax experts distinguish among three basic approaches to tax strategy.

The first is Tax compliance. This happens when a company or an individual seeks to comply with tax law in all the countries in which they operate, makes full disclosure of all relevant information on all their tax claims, and seeks to pay the right amount of tax required by law at the right time and in the right place, where right means that the economic substance of their transactions is consistent with the form in which they are declared.

At the other end of the scale is tax evasion. Tax evasion is an illegal activity undertaken to reduce an individual or company’s tax bill. It occurs when a taxpayer fails to declare all or part of his or her income or makes a claim to offset an expense against taxable income that he or she did not incur or was not allowed to claim for tax purposes. Tax evasion is a criminal offence in most countries but a civil offence in a minority of countries, such as Switzerland and Liechtenstein. The difference is significant. Such countries cannot legally cooperate in civil matters; hence the Swiss authorities’ most common response to other countries’ requests for assistance in cases connected to tax evasion has been that eager and keen as they are to stamp such unsavory practices, sadly they are unable to cooperate because tax evasion is a civil matter in the Swiss Federation.

This characteristic response has been highlighted in recent events. In 2008, when massive tax evasion through highly secretive Liechtenstein foundations was made public, a Liechtenstein spokesperson explained how surprised and disappointed they were to discover that these secret foundations, set up under a law passed in 1926, could be abused by foreigners for tax evasion purposes. Liechtenstein, she said, was perhaps a tad naive, believing that most people in the world would behave just like its own citizens and would cheerfully pay all taxes due—but naivety, she added, was not a crime. The implication was clear: Liechtenstein wished us to believe that it was taken for a ride by those nasty foreigners. Few were deceived by the response.

Finally, there is tax avoidance. Tax avoidance is the gray area between tax compliance and tax evasion. This is the favorite area occupied by an army of accountants, lawyers, bankers, and tax experts. Strictly speaking, a tax avoiding individual or a company seeks to ensure that one of three things happens. First, they might seek to pay less tax than might be required by a reasonable interpretation of a country’s law. Second, they might hope that tax is paid on profits declared in a country other than where they were really earned. Third, they might arrange to pay tax somewhat later than the profits were earned.

Legally, there is a clear difference between evasion and avoidance. Tax professionals like to cite a series of court rulings, mainly from the major countries in the world, which appear to support the legality of tax avoidance. The reality, however, is more complicated. First, the tax rules of almost every country are complex, and much avoidance relies on the existence of doubt. Second, when transactions take place across international boundaries in a world that has no global tax rules, the opportunities to play off the taxation law of one state against that of another (a process that tax professionals call arbitrage) is often difficult to resist. The consequence is that the line differentiating tax evasion from avoidance is often too difficult to determine in general terms, and is way beyond the ability of most of those who participate in tax haven practice to either know or understand—a fact that the tax professional can easily exploit. For that reason, we talk of avoidance and evasion throughout this book without significant differentiation, relying in doing so on the maxim of former UK chancellor of the exchequer Dennis Healey who famously described the difference between the two as being the thickness of a prison wall.

The British Empire Strikes Back

Finance is thought of as a hyper-mobile, decentralized, and globalized web of impersonal units of risk trading. In this web London is normally ranked as either the largest or the second largest wholesale financial center in the world (Yeandle et al. 2005). We believe that London is in practice the leading international financial center, whether one thinks of international banking credit activities, foreign exchange and over-the-counter derivatives transactions, marine insurance premiums, or international bonds issues.

Conventional rankings of international financial centers are founded on a debatable assumption, that British Crown Dependencies such as Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, as well as British Overseas Territories such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, or Gibraltar are independent and separate from the UK. Remove this assumption, and a far larger string of international centers emerges, accounting for nearly one-third of cross-border bank assets and liabilities in June 2008. If we add former colonies of the British state such as Singapore and Hong Kong, the impact of a political entity long considered defunct—the British Empire—on the contemporary financial system appears decisive, accounting for a 37% share of all international banking liabilities and a 35% share of assets.

A closer examination of the list of international financial centers reveals two additional anomalies. One is the importance of mid-size European states such as Switzerland, the Benelux countries, and Ireland in international finance. Each is a significant financial center in its own right; combined, they account for nearly 20% of international banking liabilities.

A second anomaly involves political entities long thought insignificant in the modern world: city-states. Among those, best known are Singapore, Hong Kong, and Luxembourg, but we could certainly add the Caymans, Jersey, Guernsey, Bahrain, Monaco, and, of course, the City of London, as modern variants. City-states, excluding London, accounted for nearly 17% of cross-border banking liabilities in March 2008, and with the City of London, they account for roughly 28% of international banking liabilities.

Granted, there are overlaps and some degree of double counting in these figures, but this little exercise in reconfiguration of well-known statistics raises some intriguing questions. The exercise suggests that we should pay special attention to the role of the British Empire in the creation of a British-dominated offshore economy. And we also should pay attention to the unique role played by the European intermediate havens. Both are used for tax avoidance and evasion purposes, which is the British-dominated pole of the offshore economy. However, these same British-influenced locations have also been closely linked to the rise of investment banking since the 1980s, whereas the European havens have specialized instead in what may be described as the harvesting of profits from intangibles (such as logos, brand names, etc.), in which they encourage companies to relocate into specialized low-tax vehicles registered in their domains.

Tax Havens and the Professionals

So far, we have approached tax havens as a state strategy. Such an approach is common, but it can be highly misleading. We will miss a crucial aspect of tax havens unless we pay close attention to the commercial firms that service them.

The biggest accounting firms, together with lawyers and bankers, tax experts and financial traders, plus their associated trust and corporate services companies, are to be found in most tax havens, but most prominently in the thirty or so largest jurisdictions. These professionals are crucial: as far as we can tell, they were present at each and every legislative innovation designed to avoid tax and regulation. They advised and coaxed the politicians to provide the legislation they needed to pursue their trade, and on occasions they drafted that legislation for the states in which they had located themselves. The professionals have also been present in each and every redrafting of the laws of offshore and they are the ones who actually set up the offshore facilities that such legislation enables. They also innovate new techniques of evasion and avoidance, which they sell to clients; lobby against changes in the laws against tax havens; and argue that tax havens are an entirely legitimate form