Just want to point out that this was all possible because of the hard work of people at the icij. They do amazing work (same group that did the Panama papers and one of the last real independent investigative news organizations in the US) and deserve your support!
As an aside, I would also ask this question: why not democratize this and make billions using the same loopholes so that everyone gains access or they are forced to fix it? Surely it’s a good startup opportunity.
The way I understand these schemes is that they require minimum balance way above what an average person has to be effective, but not sure. Would love a professional tax engineer/CPA opinion.
There was a documentary on Dutch TV a couple of years ago, about 'DYI tax haven management' for common people. Can't remember which public channel it was on, and what the name was. Might have been part of "Tegenlicht" series.
Update: Maybe it was the program Rambam where the makers set up their own tax haven based on the methods of the big corporations. Information in Dutch:
No. Anyone can register a LLC in any of these places. They have minimal filing requirements going forward too.
You may be required to have a local agent, and they will add their address and names as the nominee shareholders so you remain anonymous. Then with an LLC, the company can open bank accounts and you can move money. Any money made offshore is non-taxed locally.
There are 2 major reasons why people choose to use layers of corporations in other countries: tax minimization (in their domestic country) and obscurity of the assets-owners relationship.
The latter is used by corrupt politicians, oligarchs (extremely wealthy people who have massive influence on policy/politics), and to stifle investigations by civil investigations (divorce), to stifle criminal investigations (political corruption, sanctions avoidance, fences for thieves, a convenient vehicle for transactions or large assets so governments/ oversight can’t easily track them).
There is a minimum overhead required (you need at least a part time CPA and attorney to give you the strategy, more if they actually implement it), but I don’t think it requires you be ultra wealthy. The problem is that most law-abiding, non-sociopath people don’t benefit much from avoiding the law.
Isn't the icij "just" a network of people already doing investigative journalism who work on this stuff anyway? As in it's just a place where investigative journalists can meet/discuss investigations that cross borders? My impression were that they were just normal journalists and that groups then formed and disbanded based on interest within this network.
I certainly love their work, and I think a network like that is very important (we should probably have something similar for software developers/IT people across Europe), calling them a group seems wrong with my understanding though.
It's not one or the other, it's both. They both do original reporting on their own and act as a loose network of smaller investigative journalism organizations. It truly depends on the task at hand, but it's usually very useful to get some of the local investigative journalists involved, as they're the ones that both understand the language and are able to put the leaked data into context. Usually ICIJ is the one that publishes the English version of the story and their local partner(s) publish the same thing in the local language.
Actually, I'd say there's three such networks: ICIJ, GIJN and OCCRP. They're not really competitors, each serving slightly different purposes, and there's plenty of collaboration and overlap between their members.
Source: I'm not in that world anymore, but I knew about Panama Papers long before it was public and have my name in the credits in some of the collaborations with ICIJ.
True, but they also tend to be papers that can't consistently rely on advertising, precisely because of their investigations (publishing the deeds of corporate billionaires is a great way to not get ads placed for whatever the billionaire sells.)
So, at least subscribe to one of the papers !
(I know, sorry HN, I asked people to pay for a service that could be financed by ads to gather more data - aka more food for the algo. Sorry.)
To be honest, making a business out of this might be the best way to convince regulators to close the loopholes. You could even devote N% of the revenue to closing the loopholes. There’s DEFINITELY a large moral hazard though, it would be very easy to lose your soul, or to be kicked out by the board in favor of a more malleable leader :/
Edit: after reading the article, I realize most of the “loopholes” to be changes are in disparate countries, not the _source_ country. This makes the whole idea less attractive. I suppose you could potentially still get rid of the anonymous-representative option by which people conceal their connection to different assets.
Technically, if the VC and the startup is located in the blacklisted country i don't see why not. Basically we will start the torrent site like DNS witch hunt, but still possible. I assume the "elites" would not be too happy and do everything in their power to stop it?
I have to say that as an American in 2025, this kind of news hits a little different than it used-to.
In prior years, I didn't have nagging anxieties about people's life savings being arbitrarily frozen/seized as a form of political retribution, or the imposition of China-style capital controls to ensure "patriotic investing."
Before anybody decries that as (still) far-fetched, consider that the federal government forced banks to drain millions from the accounts of states (NY), announced $365,000/yr "fines" on undocumented immigrants, and imposed arbitrary (illegal) import taxes while threatening companies against showing it on the bill.
The authors write that it's "counterintuitive " that in states with low crime and efficient beaurocracies, the uberrich tend to conceal or relocate their wealth more. See:
"This suggests a counterintuitive result: use of offshore finance is driven not only by negative political conditions such as corruption and lack of civil justice, but by positive conditions, such as regulatory enforcement and civil justice."
But it's not counterintuitive at all. Those people aren't concerned about getting mugged and they're definitely not concerned about how long it takes to get a construction permit in a corrupt country. They're concerned about state-sponsored expropriation.
Given so many of the comments here about tracking the offshore accounts down and confiscating the contents, it's no surprise.
Irrespective of whether their practices are immoral, unethical, unfair, or unjust, they're definitely not counterintuitive.
It's genuinely hard for me to understand how the authors could believe otherwise.
I'm intrigued as to the framing of your post. You seem to be positing that it's entirely expected and understandable that wealthy individuals in well functioning systems should commit fraud to the detriment of the system that brought them their wealth. That seems counterintuitive to me, at least.
If we're talking about wealth not income, then no, not really. We don't usually think of asset seizure as "taxes". In other words, one "taxes" flows (like capital gains and wages) and "siezes" stocks (like bank deposits and equity).
"You seem to be positing that it's entirely expected and understandable"
I wasn't making value judgement, but yes, if you look at it with the assumption these wealthy individuals are cold, calculating, self-interested actors, then it's "expected and understandable" to me.
"That seems counterintuitive to me, at least."
I think you're using "intuitive" as a shorthand for "the way things ought to work in a righteous world", where I find incentives and disincentives to be a more intuitive way of understanding the world.
"wealthy individuals in well functioning systems should commit fraud to the detriment of the system that brought them their wealth"
To be fair, it's not necessarily fraudulent to have offshore accounts or to conceal your identity (it can certainly be depending on the circumstances). Technically I have an "offshore" account, I just happen to be living outside the US and a US citizen. I also use mechanisms to conceal my identity when registering domain names, for example. Is it the same thing, no, but these people might not technically be doing anything illegal.
It isn't necessarily true that those systems "brought them their wealth" either. Plenty of them likely inherited wealth that was accumulated long before the current systems were put in place (granted, it could very well have been accumulated illegitimately 300 years ago).
(Again, I'm not saying any of this is how the world should work, I'm trying to look at the world dispassionately and describe how things seem to be)
At the level of wealth we're discussing, these individuals probably have to think about "diversifying" among nation-states. Instead of worrying about whether to short the tech sector, they're worried about a country being invaded and the new puppet regime deciding to nationalize the hydroelectric dam they financed. Or they may be worrying about whether their country of residence will pass a law that the biggest national telcom must sell the government a majority stake (i.e., their share) at a government-mandated price denominated in an inflating currency... with expert bureaucratic efficiency.
Nope. Legacy protection. Protection from state seizure and civil forfeiture. Protection from nationalization. Protection from a spouse or even your own children. Protection from takeovers of family businesses and assets.
There are a number of reasons why we might use offshore companies and apparent tax havens - while the taxes are an added sweetener, the main reason is that there is often concrete rule of law in these jurisdictions.
Did you know that for Russians and Chinese, the US is a tax haven? As long as you're not a US resident, you only pay US taxes (which can be easily optimized to be far below Russian or Chinese taxes). You enjoy a high degree of anonymity. You also get to gamble in the biggest equity markets of the world, which are backed by a strong financial system eager to lend you gambling money based on your assets.
Compare that to Russia, India or China, where your assets can be seized at a moment's notice, on the whims of some pencil pusher bureaucrat or judge.
Is there a good primer on how this kind of offshoring works, for people ? I have notions of how tax evasion / optimization works (things like the irish-dutch sandwich, where you manage to pretend that Google does not make any money in France because it has to pay a very expensive license to Google Ireland , etc..)
But for offshoring, I'm clueless as to how manage to "reshore" the money, so to speak, so that you can eventually... Spend it to buy stuff. (Or isn't that the purpose of hiding the money ?)
That’s my understanding of how modern money laundering works. Can’t move your money out of a particular bank due to regulations? Use it as collateral to loan money to any other entity you wish. Fancy.
I talked to someone recently who claimed to know someone personally with 16,000 metric tons of gold. He claims that there is waaay more gold than is officially on the books. Hard to believe… but maybe not. He claims that there is unbelievable wealth out there—many more hundred-billionaires than official stats hold. Ok. Who knows?
> But for offshoring, I'm clueless as to how manage to "reshore" the money, so to speak, so that you can eventually... Spend it to buy stuff. (Or isn't that the purpose of hiding the money ?)
Why would you reshore the bulk of funds? We're talking about people for whom a couple of million is just spare money.
If you want to buy a company, you just use the offshore funds directly. If you want to buy a major luxury good (a yacht or a jet), you do the same and then just lease/rent it to yourself.
If you _absolutely_ need cash in the US, you can pay yourself dividends and take a hit paying taxes on this amount only.
Maybe a bit late to comment, but for what it's worth: There is no primer that could be actually useful, because the "tax optimization" landscape is fragmented and constantly shifting. Everything depends on where you live, where you do business, how much much money is involved, etc.
But there is a central driving force behind it all: governments constantly fight for "tax justice" with one hand and create various "incentives" and exceptions with the other, in an effort to briefly gain the upper hand over other countries in the zero-sum game of attracting international capital. The former tends to plug all possible loopholes for the "ordinary wealthy", while the latter always leaves options for the truly big fish, they just don't stay the same decade-over-decade.
>Is there a good primer on how this kind of offshoring works, for people ?
There isn't. People with deep knowledge of this don't invest their time writing blogs. Bit like OpenAI employees don't write blogs about how to train world class models. It's just not a thing.
There is an abundance of shrill articles by journalists writing about it that derive their knowledge from other articles written by journalists who in turn...
The big tech stuff flowing through Ireland is indeed lets call it convenient for both ireland and big tech, but what people don't realise is that chances are very high that their own pension likely flows through offshore structuring too. These places act as a central neutral clearing house of sorts that is acceptable to a lot of jurisdictions so even actors not after tax evasion use them.
Sure, I'm not expecting a tutorial on how to offshore my money.
However, to follow you point: openai does not explain how they train _their_ models, but there is plenty of material out there about how models are trained "in general" (kharpaty's videos, for example.)
On the same vein, I perfectly expect off shoring practices to be kinda "secret and sensitive information", as they are basically "exploits" of tax code - but that does not mean that all cybersecurity books are "shill".
The people who implements offshoring have to learn from somewhere, so there is written tracks. It might even be taught in accounting schools, assuming that some part of it is in a gray area, "legally."
This is the kind of very high level info I'm interested in.
At the multinational level you never have to actually reshore anything. The corporation buys things, or you take loans at incredibly low interest rates using corporate assets as collateral. Using made up numbers, imagine you take out a $1M loan, you get charged 1% interest, you put up $2M in corporate assets as collateral, and the corporation pays the bill directly.
So the lender accepts money on an offshore account as collateral to your corporation ? Which means a lot of people "know" that you're behind the account ?
Do they pretend not to know, or are they layers of people that know less and less to give plausible deniability ?
(Or maybe they're the discrete kind, and they won't tell anyone. And we're back to "whether USA plans to invade Switzerland in the coming months ?", I guess)
The way money is re-shored is whenever a US President (so far only republican Presidents) decide to give companies a tax holiday. So far Bush and Trump gave such holidays. Which means that corporate treasuries only have to wait for the next Republican president to re-patriate their off-shore cash. During this time corporations usually use debt to service dividend payments, share repurchases, and operating expenses in the US.
Ok now find their hidden assets and take them. Criminals shouldn’t be allowed to get away with crime right? These are some of the worst, IMO, as they rose on our backs and then turned around and stole the fair share they owed to society via tax cheating.
Asset security is exactly one of the reasons people seek foreign shelters. If you've got a ton of value to control, you want it to be secure, and sometimes your own government is the primary threat.
This is especially true if your wealth comes from capital markets.
If I buy a bunch of baseball cards at 1c each and later it turns out that the market values them at $100 each, I never actually "took" money from anyone. Yes it's patently unfair that I got that lucky, but it wasn't necessarily at anyone's expense.
Now, when I actually go to sell those cards then I do actually "take" money from someone else, but while those gains are unrealized it's just paper wealth.
In such a case it's also not clear who I am "taking" from. The person buying them off of me gave me the money, but you could also say the baseball card company was exploited and lost out on pricing their cards at $100?
Value can be created from nothing, I am sure you can give an example or two, but in general nothing large and valuable is created without the effort of a lot of people together, relying on the societal systems that are funded by taxes.
I suggest that you could count on one hand the number of people in the entire history of humanity who could and would hide this kind of wealth who didn't earn it through somehow relying on others and/or society's structure.
in fact value is created in every transaction: someone sells something for more money than it's worth to them and someone buys the thing for less money than the thing is worth to them (otherwise the transaction would not occur)
The planet's ressources are finite though. When you print money, you don't create value, since there's still the same amount of matter being traded around, you just reduce the value of everybody's money.
And so you rob everybody.
What's interesting about the Cayman Islands is that they are the 4th largest holder of U.S. debt, with $441 billion[1].
So USD flows into Cayman banks, and those banks need to do something with the massive amounts of money just sitting there. So what do they do? They buy U.S. Treasuries. And half a trillion dollars is just their holdings in U.S. debt, imagine how much more money is hidden in those accounts and invested in other assets.
Well the people who control enforcement are the elite. Right? Trump is one of the elites. So you think they're going to enforce anything? You think it will be easy?
Because the author's definition of Blacklisted jurisdictions is not clear in the article or the research paper without buying the footnoted book:
The current EU blacklist includes 11 jurisdictions: American Samoa, Anguilla, Fiji, Guam, Palau, Panama, the Russian Federation, Samoa, Trinidad & Tobago, US Virgin Islands, and Vanuatu. (Source: EU List of Non-Cooperative Nations for Tax Purposes - European Commission)
If anyone has a better definition or has read the underlying book, please let me know, but I found the research hard to follow without this being well defined as the OECD apparently no longer maintains a blacklist.
Also, I wondered why more famous countries are not on the list and it says that these large commissions often identify small weak islands, because large players like the US, Britain, Switzerland, Luxembourg, China have enough political power to not be placed on the list.
This is so surprising to see research on. It’s also very brave. It’s the kind of investigation that could get a drone or a hitman sent after the investigator.
Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia (née Vella; 26 August 1964 – 16 October 2017) was a Maltese writer, journalist, blogger and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta. She was known internationally for her investigation of the Panama Papers and subsequent assassination by a car bomb. Caruana Galizia focused on investigative journalism, reporting on government corruption, nepotism, patronage, and allegations of money laundering, links between Malta's online gambling industry and organized crime, Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme, and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. Caruana Galizia's national and international reputation was built on her regular reporting of misconduct by Maltese politicians and politically exposed persons.
Readit News
More info here: https://www.icij.org/
As an aside, I would also ask this question: why not democratize this and make billions using the same loopholes so that everyone gains access or they are forced to fix it? Surely it’s a good startup opportunity.
The Town That Took On The Tax Man https://youtu.be/ipV_GU7YaQg
It’s about a Welsh town that set out to do just this. Recommended watch.
Update: Maybe it was the program Rambam where the makers set up their own tax haven based on the methods of the big corporations. Information in Dutch:
https://pers.bnnvara.nl/rambam-ontduikt-belasting-met-medewe...
You may be required to have a local agent, and they will add their address and names as the nominee shareholders so you remain anonymous. Then with an LLC, the company can open bank accounts and you can move money. Any money made offshore is non-taxed locally.
No different to Delaware.
Deleted Comment
The latter is used by corrupt politicians, oligarchs (extremely wealthy people who have massive influence on policy/politics), and to stifle investigations by civil investigations (divorce), to stifle criminal investigations (political corruption, sanctions avoidance, fences for thieves, a convenient vehicle for transactions or large assets so governments/ oversight can’t easily track them).
There is a minimum overhead required (you need at least a part time CPA and attorney to give you the strategy, more if they actually implement it), but I don’t think it requires you be ultra wealthy. The problem is that most law-abiding, non-sociopath people don’t benefit much from avoiding the law.
Isn't the icij "just" a network of people already doing investigative journalism who work on this stuff anyway? As in it's just a place where investigative journalists can meet/discuss investigations that cross borders? My impression were that they were just normal journalists and that groups then formed and disbanded based on interest within this network.
I certainly love their work, and I think a network like that is very important (we should probably have something similar for software developers/IT people across Europe), calling them a group seems wrong with my understanding though.
Actually, I'd say there's three such networks: ICIJ, GIJN and OCCRP. They're not really competitors, each serving slightly different purposes, and there's plenty of collaboration and overlap between their members.
Source: I'm not in that world anymore, but I knew about Panama Papers long before it was public and have my name in the credits in some of the collaborations with ICIJ.
So, at least subscribe to one of the papers !
(I know, sorry HN, I asked people to pay for a service that could be financed by ads to gather more data - aka more food for the algo. Sorry.)
what do you mean by that? support by doing data journalism? more like hacktivism?
The median household net worth is ~200k.
I don't think there are many VCs willing to invest into this.
Edit: after reading the article, I realize most of the “loopholes” to be changes are in disparate countries, not the _source_ country. This makes the whole idea less attractive. I suppose you could potentially still get rid of the anonymous-representative option by which people conceal their connection to different assets.
Dead Comment
In prior years, I didn't have nagging anxieties about people's life savings being arbitrarily frozen/seized as a form of political retribution, or the imposition of China-style capital controls to ensure "patriotic investing."
Before anybody decries that as (still) far-fetched, consider that the federal government forced banks to drain millions from the accounts of states (NY), announced $365,000/yr "fines" on undocumented immigrants, and imposed arbitrary (illegal) import taxes while threatening companies against showing it on the bill.
Given so many of the comments here about tracking the offshore accounts down and confiscating the contents, it's no surprise.
Irrespective of whether their practices are immoral, unethical, unfair, or unjust, they're definitely not counterintuitive.
It's genuinely hard for me to understand how the authors could believe otherwise.
So... Taxes?
I'm intrigued as to the framing of your post. You seem to be positing that it's entirely expected and understandable that wealthy individuals in well functioning systems should commit fraud to the detriment of the system that brought them their wealth. That seems counterintuitive to me, at least.
If we're talking about wealth not income, then no, not really. We don't usually think of asset seizure as "taxes". In other words, one "taxes" flows (like capital gains and wages) and "siezes" stocks (like bank deposits and equity).
"You seem to be positing that it's entirely expected and understandable"
I wasn't making value judgement, but yes, if you look at it with the assumption these wealthy individuals are cold, calculating, self-interested actors, then it's "expected and understandable" to me.
"That seems counterintuitive to me, at least."
I think you're using "intuitive" as a shorthand for "the way things ought to work in a righteous world", where I find incentives and disincentives to be a more intuitive way of understanding the world.
"wealthy individuals in well functioning systems should commit fraud to the detriment of the system that brought them their wealth"
To be fair, it's not necessarily fraudulent to have offshore accounts or to conceal your identity (it can certainly be depending on the circumstances). Technically I have an "offshore" account, I just happen to be living outside the US and a US citizen. I also use mechanisms to conceal my identity when registering domain names, for example. Is it the same thing, no, but these people might not technically be doing anything illegal.
It isn't necessarily true that those systems "brought them their wealth" either. Plenty of them likely inherited wealth that was accumulated long before the current systems were put in place (granted, it could very well have been accumulated illegitimately 300 years ago).
(Again, I'm not saying any of this is how the world should work, I'm trying to look at the world dispassionately and describe how things seem to be)
At the level of wealth we're discussing, these individuals probably have to think about "diversifying" among nation-states. Instead of worrying about whether to short the tech sector, they're worried about a country being invaded and the new puppet regime deciding to nationalize the hydroelectric dam they financed. Or they may be worrying about whether their country of residence will pass a law that the biggest national telcom must sell the government a majority stake (i.e., their share) at a government-mandated price denominated in an inflating currency... with expert bureaucratic efficiency.
So... no, not really taxes.
Lawsuits, divorces, taxes on unrealized income, taxes contested by another state, offshore earning complications, ...
The trauma of giant unexpected bills or losses can make people do ... things.
There are a number of reasons why we might use offshore companies and apparent tax havens - while the taxes are an added sweetener, the main reason is that there is often concrete rule of law in these jurisdictions.
Did you know that for Russians and Chinese, the US is a tax haven? As long as you're not a US resident, you only pay US taxes (which can be easily optimized to be far below Russian or Chinese taxes). You enjoy a high degree of anonymity. You also get to gamble in the biggest equity markets of the world, which are backed by a strong financial system eager to lend you gambling money based on your assets.
Compare that to Russia, India or China, where your assets can be seized at a moment's notice, on the whims of some pencil pusher bureaucrat or judge.
But for offshoring, I'm clueless as to how manage to "reshore" the money, so to speak, so that you can eventually... Spend it to buy stuff. (Or isn't that the purpose of hiding the money ?)
I talked to someone recently who claimed to know someone personally with 16,000 metric tons of gold. He claims that there is waaay more gold than is officially on the books. Hard to believe… but maybe not. He claims that there is unbelievable wealth out there—many more hundred-billionaires than official stats hold. Ok. Who knows?
Why would you reshore the bulk of funds? We're talking about people for whom a couple of million is just spare money.
If you want to buy a company, you just use the offshore funds directly. If you want to buy a major luxury good (a yacht or a jet), you do the same and then just lease/rent it to yourself.
If you _absolutely_ need cash in the US, you can pay yourself dividends and take a hit paying taxes on this amount only.
But there is a central driving force behind it all: governments constantly fight for "tax justice" with one hand and create various "incentives" and exceptions with the other, in an effort to briefly gain the upper hand over other countries in the zero-sum game of attracting international capital. The former tends to plug all possible loopholes for the "ordinary wealthy", while the latter always leaves options for the truly big fish, they just don't stay the same decade-over-decade.
There isn't. People with deep knowledge of this don't invest their time writing blogs. Bit like OpenAI employees don't write blogs about how to train world class models. It's just not a thing.
There is an abundance of shrill articles by journalists writing about it that derive their knowledge from other articles written by journalists who in turn...
The big tech stuff flowing through Ireland is indeed lets call it convenient for both ireland and big tech, but what people don't realise is that chances are very high that their own pension likely flows through offshore structuring too. These places act as a central neutral clearing house of sorts that is acceptable to a lot of jurisdictions so even actors not after tax evasion use them.
On the same vein, I perfectly expect off shoring practices to be kinda "secret and sensitive information", as they are basically "exploits" of tax code - but that does not mean that all cybersecurity books are "shill".
The people who implements offshoring have to learn from somewhere, so there is written tracks. It might even be taught in accounting schools, assuming that some part of it is in a gray area, "legally."
This is the kind of very high level info I'm interested in.
(Or maybe they're the discrete kind, and they won't tell anyone. And we're back to "whether USA plans to invade Switzerland in the coming months ?", I guess)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_tax_holiday
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Asset security is exactly one of the reasons people seek foreign shelters. If you've got a ton of value to control, you want it to be secure, and sometimes your own government is the primary threat.
If I buy a bunch of baseball cards at 1c each and later it turns out that the market values them at $100 each, I never actually "took" money from anyone. Yes it's patently unfair that I got that lucky, but it wasn't necessarily at anyone's expense.
Now, when I actually go to sell those cards then I do actually "take" money from someone else, but while those gains are unrealized it's just paper wealth.
In such a case it's also not clear who I am "taking" from. The person buying them off of me gave me the money, but you could also say the baseball card company was exploited and lost out on pricing their cards at $100?
I suggest that you could count on one hand the number of people in the entire history of humanity who could and would hide this kind of wealth who didn't earn it through somehow relying on others and/or society's structure.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
— Leona Helmsley
So USD flows into Cayman banks, and those banks need to do something with the massive amounts of money just sitting there. So what do they do? They buy U.S. Treasuries. And half a trillion dollars is just their holdings in U.S. debt, imagine how much more money is hidden in those accounts and invested in other assets.
1. https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...
No.
None of this stuff is permanent.
The current EU blacklist includes 11 jurisdictions: American Samoa, Anguilla, Fiji, Guam, Palau, Panama, the Russian Federation, Samoa, Trinidad & Tobago, US Virgin Islands, and Vanuatu. (Source: EU List of Non-Cooperative Nations for Tax Purposes - European Commission)
If anyone has a better definition or has read the underlying book, please let me know, but I found the research hard to follow without this being well defined as the OECD apparently no longer maintains a blacklist.
Also, I wondered why more famous countries are not on the list and it says that these large commissions often identify small weak islands, because large players like the US, Britain, Switzerland, Luxembourg, China have enough political power to not be placed on the list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia
Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia (née Vella; 26 August 1964 – 16 October 2017) was a Maltese writer, journalist, blogger and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta. She was known internationally for her investigation of the Panama Papers and subsequent assassination by a car bomb. Caruana Galizia focused on investigative journalism, reporting on government corruption, nepotism, patronage, and allegations of money laundering, links between Malta's online gambling industry and organized crime, Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme, and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. Caruana Galizia's national and international reputation was built on her regular reporting of misconduct by Maltese politicians and politically exposed persons.
No one is going to get killed for this one!