[256] CAPITAL FUGITIVO E PARAÍSOS FISCAIS - OFFSHORE BANKING: THE AUTHOR AND THE BOOK ABOUT THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF GLOBALIZATION. By Nicholas Shaxson.

This is the great untold story of globalisation. 

Without understanding the tax havens, or the secrecy jurisdictions as I often prefer to call them, we cannot understand the world. Treasure Islands at last starts to fill this gigantic hole in modern history. In short, it is the most important exposé of tax havens ever published.

American edition's cover

The Author and The Book: Treasure Islands: tax havens and the men who stole the world. [19nov2010]

Without understanding offshore, we will never understand the history of the modern world.

Source: The Book site

http://treasureislands.org/the-book/

Access RAS in 08apr2016

[A] The Author: Nicholas Shaxson

Nicholas Shaxson is a British writer, journalist and investigator. He is author of the acclaimed 2007 book Poisoned Wells: the Dirty Politics of African Oil, and, following completion of Treasure Islands in 2010, a journalist and part-time writer and researcher for the Tax Justice Network, an expert-led group focused on tax and tax havens. In 2012 the International Tax Review named him as one of its “Global Tax 50″ most influential people in international tax.

Since 1993 he has written extensively on global business and politics for the Financial Times, Reuters, Vanity Fair, the Economist and its sister publication the Economist Intelligence Unit, International Affairs, Foreign Affairs, the American Interest, the BBC, Africa Confidential, African Energy, and a wide range of others.

He was born in Malawi in 1966 and has lived at various times in India, Brazil, England, Lesotho, Spain, Angola, South Africa, the Netherlands and Switzerland. He currently lives with his partner and their two children in Berlin, Germany.

[B] The Book [19nov2010]

1.       Millions of people have a queasy feeling that something is not right in the global economy – but they struggle to put their fingers on what exactly the problem is. Treasure Islands at last tells the real story of where it all went wrong. This is the great untold story of globalisation.

2.       Tax havens are not exotic, murky sideshows at the fringes of the world economy: they lie at its centre. Half of world trade flows, at least on paper, through tax havens. Every multinational corporation uses them routinely. The biggest users of tax havens by far are not terrorists, spivs, celebrities or Mafiosi – but banks.

3.       Tax havens are the ultimate source of strength for our global elites. Just as European nobles once consolidated their unaccountable powers in fortified castles, to better subjugate and extract tribute from the surrounding peasantry, so financial capital has coalesced in their modern equivalent today: the tax havens. In these fortified nodes of secret, unaccountable political and economic power, financial and criminal interests have come together to capture local political systems and turn the havens into their own private law-making factories, protected against outside interference by the world’s most powerful countries – most especially Britain. Treasure Islands will, for the first time, show the blood and guts of just how they do it.

4.       Tax havens aren’t just about tax. They are about escape – escape from criminal laws, escape from creditors, escape from tax, escape from prudent financial regulation – above all, escape from democratic scrutiny and accountability. Tax havens get rich by taking fees for providing these escape routes. This is their core line of business. It is what they do.

5.       These escape routes transform the merely powerful into the untouchable. “Don’t tax or regulate us or we will flee offshore!” the financiers cry, and elected politicians around the world crawl on their bellies and capitulate. And so tax havens lead a global race to the bottom to offer deeper secrecy, ever laxer financial regulations, and ever more sophisticated tax loopholes.

6.       They have become the silent battering rams of financial deregulation, forcing countries to remove financial regulations, to cut taxes and restraints on the wealthy, and to shift all the risks, costs and taxes onto the backs of the rest of us. In the process democracy unravels and the offshore system pushes ever further onshore. The world’s two most important tax havens today are United States and Britain.

7.       Without understanding offshore, we will never understand the history of the modern world.

8.       Poverty in Africa? Offshore is at the heart of the matter. Industrial-scale corruption and the wholesale subversion of governments by criminalised interests, across the developing world? Offshore is central to the story, every time.

9.       The systematic looting of the former Soviet Union and the merging of the nuclear-armed country’s intelligence apparatus with organized crime, is a story that unfolds substantially in London and its offshore satellites. Saddam Hussein used tax havens to buttress his power, as does North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il today.

10.   Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s strange hold over Italian politics is very much an offshore tale. The Elf Affair, Europe’s biggest ever corruption scandal, had secrecy jurisdictions at its core.

11.   Arms smuggling to terrorist organisations? The growth of mafia empires? Offshore. You can only fit about $1 million into a briefcase: without offshore, the illegal drugs trade would be a fraction of its size.

12.   Private equity and hedge funds? Goldman Sachs? Citigroup? These are all creatures of offshore. The scandals of Enron, Parmalat, Long Term Capital Management, Lehman Brothers, AIG — and many more? Tax havens lay behind them all. The rise of multinationals, the explosion of debt in advanced economies since the 1970s is substantially an offshore tale. Complex monopolies, frauds, insider trading rings — these corruptions of free markets always have tax havens at their heart. As Treasure Islands explains in vivid, thrilling, horrifying detail, every big financial crisis since the 1970s – including the great global crisis that erupted in 2007 – has been a creature of the tax havens.

13.   These problems all have other explanations too. Tax havens are never the only story, because offshore exists only in relation to elsewhere. That is why it is called offshore.

14.   Without understanding the tax havens, or the secrecy jurisdictions as I often prefer to call them, we cannot understand the world. Treasure Islands at last starts to fill this gigantic hole in modern history. In short, it is the most important exposé of tax havens ever published.

[C] The Praise

http://treasureislands.org/praise-for-the-book/

A fascinating, chilling book
- Paul Krugman

An utterly superb book . . . a story told with uncommon vigor and insight.
- Jeffrey Sachs (also here.)

Perhaps the most important book published in the UK so far this year
- George Monbiot, The Guardian

An absolutely riveting book . . . . a gobsmacking indictment of a global conspiracy that makes City bonuses seem like small change.
- The Herald

A blistering account of the role that tax havens play in international finance. . . brilliant.”
- London Review of Books

Should be on everyone’s bookshelf.
- Pauline Skypala, Financial Times

This excellent book … breathtaking and terrifying.
- Irish Times

Fascinating and horrifying
- John Lanchester

Combines meticulous research with amusing anecdotes, resulting in a very readable account of the murky world of offshore and a strong moral message that the system needs to be changed.
- Financial Times

A bombshell
- Bibi van der Zee, The Guardian

A vigorous and well-researched polemic
- Foreign Affairs

Treasure Islands has prised the lid off an important and terrifying can of worms
- Literary Review

“la remarquable étude de Nicholas Shaxson”
- Mediapart

“This engrossing book will make you think again . . . first-rate forensic work.”
- The Independent.

Put down this magazine now and rush to your local library or closest bookshop and get your hands on perhaps the most important book to appear in recent years for those who care about social justice.
- Red Pepper

Nicholas Shaxson’s excellent Treasure Islands
- David Cay Johnston

A fascinating narrative that is both analytically compelling and rich in institutional detail.
- Nancy Folbre, New York Times Economix site.

Treasure Islands, Nicholas Shaxson’s excellent book on the global offshore tax system
- Financial Times Alphaville

This important new book
- Lee A. Sheppard, Tax Notes

Possibly the most important political book that I have read since The Spirit Level.
- Stuart Weir, co-founder of Charter 88, former editor of the New Statesman

Nicholas Shaxson digs deeper than any previous research on the size and shape of global finance and the extent to which it is now beyond the reach of most national governments. . . essential context for the likely next scenarios as 24-7 high-frequency trading in globalized financial markets outstrips the fixed geographies of nations and their governments.
- Seeking Alpha

Shaxson admirably lays out the history of how tax havens have become such an insidious feature of the global economy. . . . his book will help us get serious about shutting down offshore tax abuses
- Senator Carl Levin, chair of U.S. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

A must read for anyone who wants to understand the hidden reasons why financial services firms have become so powerful and impossible to reform.
- Yves Smith, creator of Naked Capitalism and author of Econned

Shaxson does an outstanding and socially valuable job in penetrating the impenetrable and finds a deeply shocking world.
- Nicholas Stern, former World Bank chief economist, author of The Stern Review

A powerful exposé of the offshore world
- Private Eye

Uplifting . . reveals the incredible networks woven by the City
- Le Monde

Nothing short of Shakespearean, a drama full of secrecy, treachery and corruption.
- Kirkus Reviews

I would go as far as saying this book is the No Logo for a new century.
- Sunny Hundal, Liberal Conspiracy

Shaxson shows us that the global financial machine is broken and that very few of us have noticed.
- New Statesman

Tax havens have faced the treaty onslaught of the OECD and stared the leaders of the G20 in the eyes, but it is a new book, adopted by grass-roots tax-justice campaigners and the media alike, which is now causing them most aggravation. . . . A polemical yet erudite study.
- Spears magazine

Shortlist - Spears Business Books of the Year

Best financial and economic books of 2011 – Financieele Dagblad

At last, a readable – indeed gripping – book which explains the nuts and bolts of tax havens. More importantly, it lays bare the mechanism that financial capital has been using to stay in charge: capturing government policy-making around the world, shaking off such irritants as democracy and the rule of law, and making sure that suckers like you and me pay for its operators’ opulent lifestyles.
- Misha Glenny, author of McMafia

The excellent Treasure Islands . . . Shaxson comes as close to anyone ever has in getting to the crux of the tax haven conundrum, which is to attempt to answer the question: why are they tolerated?
- Evening Standard

A dismaying Big Bang of a book: a chronicle of capitalism’s frailty and foulness that digs far beyond its tax haven title.”
- Peter Preston, The Guardian

For quite a while I have not read such a well-researched, good to read and politically relevant book
- Christian Humborg, Executive Director of the German Chapter of Transparency International

The struggle against money power is a struggle for human freedom, and Nicholas Shaxson’s investigation is a timely exposé of where the plunder is buried.
- John Pilger, broadcaster and author of Heroes

A superb and crucial book.
- New Internationalist

Treasure Islands is the best book on tax havens, ever. It shines a light in some very dark places. It reads like a thriller. The shocking thing is, it’s all true. The world’s suppliers of corruption services – the bankers, lawyers and accountants working from tax havens – won’t want you to read this book. Which is exactly why you should.
- Richard Murphy, Director of Tax Research UK

Pacy, well-written book . . . a page-turner. Whatever tall tales Nicholas Shaxson told his publisher to get this book signed off, I’m glad he did.
- Sunday Times

Nicholas Shaxson shows that the real challenge to America’s economy comes not from China – but from the Caymans, the Bahamas, and a whole hot-money archipelago loosely under the control of the City of London.  If only as a civics lesson, read this astonishing book to find out the true political constitution of the world.
- Thomas Geoghegan, author of Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?

An easily digestible overview of the labyrinthine nature of the world of offshore finance.
- Seeking Alpha

A useful critique
- Tyler Cowen

Nicholas Shaxson’s excellent book on tax havens
- Ed Conway, economics editor, Sky News

Off-shore is not a remote place, it is a process of colossal tax evasion and regulatory warfare.  ‘Offshore’ is a clear, present and immediate threat to every nation’s ability to support and protect its citizens and control its economy. ‘Offshore’ is a partly orchestrated, partly evolved world of stateless money and power populated and used by a loyalty free financial elite to degrade Democracy, suborn Sovereignty and destroy national Independence.  Profound charges you might think. And so they are. And in a lesser book you might discount them as perhaps a little hysterical. But not in Mr Shaxson’s book because of page after page after chapter, of documented evidence. The freight train of evidence is a testament to Shaxson’s hard and thorough work, but also to the fact that so little of this story has been told elsewhere.
David Malone, author of The Debt Generation

Far more than an exposé, Treasure Islands is a brilliantly illuminating, forensic analysis of where economic power really lies, and the shockingly corrupt way in which it behaves. If you’re wondering how ordinary people ended up paying for a crisis caused by the reckless greed of the banking industry, this compellingly readable book provides the answers.
- David Wearing, co-editor of New Left Project

An absolute gem that deserves to be read by anyone interested in the way contemporary globalization is undermining social justice. Give it to your sons, daughters, families, favourite legislators and anyone else needing stimulation of their thoughts. This masterpiece illuminates the dark places and shows the visible hand of governments, corporations, banks, accountants, lawyers and other pirates in creating fictitious offshore transactions and structures and picking our pockets.
– Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting, University of Essex

They who sold us globalisation as a way of the whole world getting richer with fair rules, cheated us by letting the rich and powerful go “offshore”. This gripping exposé should help end the scandal.
- Anthony Barnett, Founder, openDemocracy

In this riveting, well-written expose, Shaxson goes deep into the largely unexamined realm of offshore money. In the process, he reveals that this shadow world is no mere sideshow, but is troublingly central to modern finance, with the US and the UK as leaders. The resulting abuses are widespread, ranging from tax revenue stripping from African nations to individuals and corporations escaping enforcement and accountability. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the hidden reasons why financial services firms have become so powerful and impossible to reform.
- Yves Smith, creator of Naked Capitalism and author of Econned

Every once in a while a book comes along that changes a mass audience’s view of the world. . . .It seems Treasure Islands is the wake-up call the world has been waiting for.
- Green Left

Transcendent, enlightening . . like a John le Carré thriller.
- Task Force on Financial Integrity & Economic Development

The best book I’ve read so far this year

- John O’Farrell, AgendaNI (Northern Ireland)

Meticulously researched and riveting . . . a jaw-dropper of an exposé. Shaxson takes an extremely complex issue and renders it all comprehensible 
- Joan Baxter, Rabble.ca

Praise in German – here.