Secrecy World is the inspiration for the Major Motion Picture The Laundromat from Director Steven Soderbergh, Starring Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, and Antonio Banderas A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist takes us inside the world revealed by the Panama Papers, a landscape of illicit money, political corruption, and fraud on a global scale. A hidden circulatory system flows beneath the surface of global finance, carrying trillions of dollars from drug trafficking, tax evasion, bribery, and other illegal enterprises. This network masks the identities of the individuals who benefit from these activities, aided by bankers, lawyers, and auditors who get paid to look the other way. In Secrecy World, the Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Jake Bernstein explores this shadow economy and how it evolved, drawing on millions of leaked documents from the files of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca—a trove now known as the Panama Papers—as well as other journalistic and government investigations. Bernstein shows how shell companies operate, how they allow the superwealthy and celebrities to escape taxes, and how they provide cover for illicit activities on a massive scale by crime bosses and corrupt politicians across the globe. Bernstein traveled to the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and within the United States to uncover how these strands fit together—who is involved, how they operate, and the real-world impact. He recounts how Mossack Fonseca was exposed and what lies ahead for the corporations, banks, law firms, individuals, and governments that are implicated. Secrecy World offers a disturbing and sobering view of how the world really works and raises critical questions about financial and legal institutions we may once have trusted.

Virtually every jurisdiction today is busy developing private international law rules to deal with trusts and similar ring-fenced structures. With the increasing impact of globalisation, business interests throughout the world are intent on maximising the potential of such structures for raising funds, lowering risks, and cutting costs. As a result, numerous complex issues involving the traditional categories of settlor, beneficiary, and fiduciary are being radically transformed. Extending the Boundaries of Trusts and Similar Ring-Fenced Funds offers valuable analyses, by sixteen well-known authorities in the field, of a broad range of trust-related issues. The many important insights in this book reveal the workings of such issues as the following: the disappearing divergence between common law and civil law jurisdictions in the matter of trusts; using the segregated fund concept to manage the risk of insolvency; the demise of the "amateur trustee" in the charitable trust sector; why loss to the fund supersedes particular losses of beneficiaries; the legal dimensions of hiding ownership by "giving" property to trustees; the intervention of public policy in questions of perpetuity; the selective imposition of OECD and FTF transparency initiatives on offshore jurisdictions; and "policing" of trustee behaviour by beneficiaries. Lawyers, bankers, and others dealing with investment and business finance will find much information as well as food for thought in this fascinating book, as will those involved in the traditional trust industry, whether as trustees or lawyers or fund managers. Most of the essays in this outstanding thematic collection were originally prepared for presentation at a conference held in 2001 at King's College London.

Is the current U.S. tax system for taxing U.S. international business the appropriate one for the modern era of globalized business operations, or should its basic structure be reformed? Contents of this report: The Current System and Possible Revisions; Neutrality, Efficiency, and Competitiveness; Assessing the Existing Tax System; Territorial Taxation: The Dividend Exemption Proposal; A Residence-Based System in Practice; President Obama's Proposals to Restrict Deferral and Cross-Crediting; Tax Havens: Issues and Policy Options; General Reforms of the Corporate Tax and Implications for International Tax Treatment. Charts and tables. This is a print on demand edition of an important, hard-to-find publication.

Commercial banks UBS and HSBC embroiled in scandals that in some cases exposed lawmakers themselves as tax evaders… multinationals Google and Apple using the Double Irish and other tax avoidance strategies… governments granting fiscal sweetheart deals behind closed doors (as in Luxembourg)... the stream of news items documenting the crisis of global tax governance is not about to dry up. Much work has been done in individual disciplines on the phenomenon of tax competition that lies at the heart of this crisis. Yet, the combination of issues of democratic legitimacy, social justice, economic efficiency, and national sovereignty that tax competition raises clearly requires an interdisciplinary analysis. This book offers a rare example of this kind of work, bringing together experts from political science, philosophy, law, and economics whose contributions combine empirical analysis with normative and institutional proposals. It makes an important contribution to reforming international taxation.

In a thorough reappraisal of the white-collar and corporate crime scene, this Second Edition builds on the first edition to complete the criminal narrative in an outstanding reference resource.