A global super-rich elite had at least $21 trillion (£13tn) hidden in secret tax havens by the end of 2010, according to a major study.
The figure is equivalent to the size of the US and Japanese economies combined.
The Price of Offshore Revisited was written by James Henry, a former chief economist at the consultancy McKinsey, and commissioned by the Tax Justice Network.
He said $21tn is a conservative figure and the true scale could be $32tn.
In a manner of speaking I felt my life passing before my eyes as I read this book. For over twenty years I have led the charge on connecting governments to Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), only to see every government and every corporations seeking to suck at the government breast go with “butts in seats” and “time & materials.” I myself come from that culture, and as smart as I may be, I confess to have never considered the obvious: consulting fees based on the Return on Investment (ROI) in relation to specific outcomes. As I followed the author's roadmap in this book, inventorying what I know and what outcomes I can achieve for organizations that are generally mired in the Industrial Era of stove-pipes and information hoarding, oblivious to the potential of open source everything, crowd-sourcing and crowd-seeding, and so many other things, I felt a mixture of shock (how could I be so stupid) and awe (the best years are ahead of me).
I read a lot, and this book stands out as a work of practical art–the organization, the detail, the white space, the end of chapter summaries, and at the very end of the book, a series of questions that are priceless and alone worth the cost of the book.
Sometimes it occurs to me that all of our complex terminologies tend to overcomplicate the simplest and most important things, when sometimes a simple phrase can cut through all the illusory complications.
Truth is the most precious of all human commodities. And the people and institutions who control virtually everything in our world . . .
