An international network of journalists has obtained some 2.5 million records from tax havens detailing shell companies, offshore accounts and dubious financial deals. The unprecedented leaks include the names of 130,000 people who at one time or other moved their money offshore.
Oligarchs and dictators' daughters apparently have a penchant for bunkering their assets on the British Virgin Islands. Barons and composers, on the other hand, seem to prefer the Cook Islands. To cheat on taxes, they create bogus firms with imaginative names like Tantris, Moon Crystal or Sequoia.
Those are just a few details published this week on a major global system of tax evasion, which sheds new light on the methods used to deceive fiscal authorities and hide money. In what is believed to be the largest data leak in history, anonymous informants have provided an international consortium of journalists with around 2.5 million documents detailing activities in tax havens around the world.
The virtual Everest of data exposes some 120,000 letterbox entities, offshore accounts and other dubious deals in more than 170 countries, in addition to the names of 140,000 individuals alleged to have placed their money in known tax havens. The list includes politicians, celebrities, weapons dealers, oligarchs, financiers and a very diverse cast of characters. It also includes hundreds of Germans. Reporters at the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper noted that the most famous German featured on the list is society playboy Gunter Sachs, best known abroad as Brigitte Bardot's husband for a brief period in the 1960s, who committed suicide in 2011 at the age of 78.
Bradley Manning & The Deepwater Horizon By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine
Wednesday, 3. April 2013
Three years ago this month, on the 20th of April, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew itself to kingdom come.
Soon thereafter, a message came in to our office's chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, from a person I dare not name, who was floating somewhere in the Caspian Sea along the coast of Baku, Central Asia.
The source was in mortal fear he’d be identified – and with good reason. Once we agreed on a safe method of communication, he revealed this: 17 months before BP’s DeepwaterHorizon blew out and exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, another BP rig suffered an identical blow-out in the Caspian Sea.
Crucially, both the Gulf and Caspian Sea blow-outs had the same identical cause: the failure of the cement “plug”.
To prevent blow-outs, drilled wells must be capped with cement. BP insisted on lacing its cement with nitrogen gas – the same stuff used in laughing gas – because it speeds up drying.
Time is money, and mixing some nitrogen gas into the cement saves a lot of money.
However, because BP’s penny-pinching method is so damn dangerous, they are nearly alone in using it in deep, high-pressure offshore wells.
The reason: nitrogen gas can create gaps in the cement, allow methane gas to go up the borehole, fill the drilling platform with explosive gas – and boom, you’re dead.
So, when its Caspian Sea rig blew out in 2008, rather than change its ways, BP simply covered it up.
Our investigators discovered that the company hid the information from its own shareholders, from British regulators and from the US Securities Exchange Commission. The Vice-President of BP USA, David Rainey, withheld the information from the US Senate in a testimony he gave six months before the Gulf deaths. (Rainey was later charged with obstruction of justice on a spill-related matter.)
Britain's Channel 4 agreed to send me to the benighted nation of Azerbaijan, whose waters the earlier BP blow-out occurred in, to locate witnesses who would be willing to talk to me without getting “disappeared”. (They didn’t talk, but they still disappeared.)
And I was arrested. Some rat had tipped off the Security Ministry (the official name of the Department of Torture here in this Islamic Republic of BP). I knew I’d get out quick, because throwing a reporter of Her Majesty’s Empire into a dungeon would embarrass both BP and the Azeri oil-o-crats.
The gendarmes demanded our film, but I wasn’t overly concerned: Before I left London, Badpenny handed me one of those Austin Powers camera-in-pens, on which I’d loaded all I needed. But I did fear for my witnesses left behind in Azerbaijan – and for my source in a tiger cage in the USA: Pvt Bradley Manning.
Manning could have saved their lives
Only after I dove into deep water in Baku did I discover, trolling through the so-called “WikiLeaks” documents, secret State Department cables released by Manning. The information was stunning: the US State Department knew about the BP blow-out in the Caspian and joined in the cover-up.
Here, again, we have an example of the disconnect between what the American people understand and want, and what the corporate owned Congress is focused on.
The only thing that is going to change this equation is a massive voter turnout that supports compassionate life-affirming policies and politicians prepared to act on those wishes. We did it with Elizabeth Warren, we can do it in other districts.
Click through to see the charts and tables that will help you understand this report better.
PRINCETON, NJ — Americans tilt toward the view that the government is doing too little to protect the environment — at 47% — while 16% say it is doing too much. Another 35% say the government's efforts on the environment are about right. These views have not changed much since 2010, although Americans in most years between 1992 and 2006 were more likely than they are today to say the government was doing too little to protect the environment.
Detainees captured by SAS and SBS squads subjected to human-rights abuses at detention centre, say British witnesses
EXTRACT
However, one peculiarity of the way in which UK forces operated when bringing prisoners to Camp Nama suggests that ministers and senior MoD officials may have had reason to know those detainees were at risk of mistreatment. British soldiers were almost always accompanied by a lone American soldier, who was then recorded as having captured the prisoner. Members of the SAS and SBS were repeatedly briefed on the importance of this measure.
It was an arrangement that enabled the British government to side-step a Geneva convention clause that would have obliged it to demand the return of any prisoner transferred to the US once it became apparent that they were not being treated in accordance with the convention. And it consigned the prisoners to what some lawyers have described as a legal black hole.
The Great Experiment: Genetically Modified Organisms, Scientific Integrity, and National Wellness STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Columnist – Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
In September 2012, pictures of seriously tumorous rats (Figure 1) went viral across the Internet, setting off passionate and acrimonious exchanges between proponents and opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Charges and countercharges flew like verbal grapeshot across the various levels of the digital world and scientific media as each side tried to spin what these photos meant.
‘GMOs may be creating an entire generation of cancer victims who have a frighteningly heightened risk of growing massive mammary gland tumors caused by the consumption of GM foods. We are witnessing what may turn out to be the worst and most costly blunder in the history of western science: the mass poisoning of billions of people with a toxic food crop that was never properly tested in the first place,” wrote Mike Adams, an award-winning journalist specializing in health issues, in Op-Ed News.1
An early claim in the video is that DeBeers ran/has run the most successful fraudulent PR since Hollywood's “golden age” by getting everyone to think of diamonds as unique and rare to this day. “Blood diamonds” has been the more recent counter-message example that I can think of.
Toxins implanted into GM food crops to kill pests are reaching the bloodstreams of women and unborn babies, alarming research has revealed.
A landmark study found 93 per cent of blood samples taken from pregnant women and 80 per cent from umbilical cords tested positive for traces of the chemicals.
Millions of acres in North and South America are planted with GM corn containing the toxins, which is fed in vast quantities to farm livestock around the world – including Britain.
However, it is now clear the toxins designed to kill crop pests are reaching humans and babies in the womb – apparently through food.
It is not known what, if any, harm this causes but there is speculation it could lead to allergies, miscarriage, abnormalities or even cancer.
To date the industry has always argued that if these toxins were eaten by animals or humans they would be destroyed in the gut and pass out of the body, thus causing no harm.
Food safety authorities in Britain and Europe have accepted these assurances on the basis that GM crops are effectively no different to those produced using conventional methods.
