country:cayman islands

Three months into 2019, what’s the news in #crypto?
▻https://hackernoon.com/three-months-into-2019-whats-the-news-in-crypto-d51962097a89?source=rss-

The prolonged “crypto winter” combined with the numerous #ico exit scams were a significant body blow to the #blockchain-crypto space. But 2019 shows promise, with that let’s look at some of the significant market trends.ICO Landscape: ICOs take a deadly blowOverall the number of ICOs have dropped dramatically the world over, despite the efforts of some countries to create a conducive environment for launching an ICO. During Q1 of 2019, the number of ICOs fell by 61% when compared to Q4 of 2018.Funds raised ($MM) country-wisesourceIn terms of funds raised companies from countries such as the UAE and Cayman Islands have leapfrogged ahead of the usual suspects like UK and Singapore. UAE and Cayman Island companies attracted $142 million and $100 million respectively and accounted for 21% and (...)

#investing #security-token

The Cayman Islands: the Dream Jurisdiction for Crypto Startups
▻https://hackernoon.com/the-cayman-islands-the-dream-jurisdiction-for-crypto-startups-448324c004

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*1p2rQH5MAuAC7evMeuoNSg.jpeg

You’re watching a good action movie when $15 million needs to be transferred to rescue the ambassador’s daughter. Where’s the money going? The Cayman Islands, of course… it’s always the Cayman Islands.Even if you’ve not been there in person and even if you don’t know where to place it on a map, you’ve definitely heard of the Cayman Islands.This mysterious archipelago is the go-to jurisdiction for Hollywood scriptwriters whenever nefarious activity involves offshore banking. And for good reason. The Cayman Islands is one of the top places in the world to set up an offshore bank account.Though the country is typically associated with movie villains, there’s nothing necessarily nefarious about having a structure in the Cayman Islands. In fact, 47 out of 50 of the world’s leading banks have some form (...)

#cryptocurrency-investment #blockchain-startup #blockchain #politics #cryptocurrency-news

DRC: Communities mobilise to free themselves from a hundred years of colonial oil palm plantations | WRM in English
▻http://wrm.org.uy/articles-from-the-wrm-bulletin/section1/drc-communities-mobilise-to-free-themselves-from-a-hundred-years-of-colonial

Oil palms are native to the forests of Central and West Africa and inseparable from the region’s peoples and their cultures. Communities in this part of the world have relied on oil palms for thousands of years— as a source of food, textiles, medicines and construction materials.

Most of the world’s oil palms, however, are cultivated far away, in Southeast Asia, and not in forested palm groves, but on massive #monoculture #plantations where tropical forests used to stand. These oil palm plantations are a product of Europe’s brutal colonial legacy.

When the European colonizers invaded Central and West Africa during the nineteenth century, they came to understand (in a very narrow way) the possible wealth that could be generated from oil palm cultivation. They began taking over the local people’s large oil palm groves and tearing down forests to set up plantations. One of the pioneers of this effort was Britain’s Lord Leverhulme, who, through a campaign of terror against the local people, took over community palm groves and turned vast swathes of the Congo’s forests into slave plantations. His company’s oil palm plantations would eventually expand throughout West and Central Africa and then to Southeast Asia, and provide the foundation for the multinational corporation #Unilever, one of the world’s largest food companies. Unilever sold off its global oil palm plantations about a decade ago but to this day it remains one of the world’s biggest buyers of palm oil.

...

After 100 years in what is now the DRC, Unilever sold three of its oil palm plantations in 2008 to a company called #Feronia, registered until recently in the Cayman Islands. This company, listed on the Stock Exchange in Toronto, Canada and now majority owned by European development funds, had no previous experience in agriculture. Through its sale of these DRC plantations, Unilever made around USD 14 million dollars in cash and left behind around USD 10 million dollars in liabilities to the new owners.

#industrie_palmiste #esclavage #colonisation #exploitation #terres

The myth of the #offshore, by Khadija Sharife | ANCIR
▻https://panamapapers.investigativecenters.org/myth-offshore

jurisdictions like Mauritius, much like Panama, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Bermuda are also vulnerable and impoverished countries that are often coerced or incentivized by the “onshore” powers. These range from the financial muscle of multinationals including accounting and banking firms as well as the political prowess of the UK, US and Switzerland, wishing to maintain ring-fenced financial sectors. This is because the “offshore” is being used to facilitate activities that the better regulated “onshore” cannot do.

No wonder, then, that the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) called the City of London, at one point, a “head office” to the majority of the world’s tax havens that also comprise the UK’s foreign territories, including Anguilla, BVI Channel Islands, Jersey and a dozen others. But the UK’s influence and reach is not limited to its own territories. From Hong Kong to Mauritius, the UK has played a critical role in the historical development of global tax havens that have “commercialised sovereignty” in exchange for a small fee. The myth of the offshore blankets the lethal truth of the matter: more than 80% of the world’s international finance activities are conducted through offshore financial markets indirectly or directly connected to UK secrecy jurisdictions.

#panama_papers #banque #secret #UK

Five myths about tax havens
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-tax-havens/2016/04/15/76d001d2-0255-11e6-b823-707c79ce3504_story.html

Par Nicholas Shaxson

3. Besides Switzerland, most tax havens are small tropical
islands.

“Offshore tax haven” probably summons to mind tiny palm-fringed countries in the Caribbean — “sunny places for shady people,” as Britain’s former secretary of business, Vince Cable, put it. But this notion is slowly giving way to a more accurate — and more alarming — picture.

Among the world’s biggest tax havens is the United States, which hosts vast sums of foreign wealth under conditions of strong secrecy. States including Delaware and Nevada allow shell companies whose owners are not identified, providing cover for foreign cash. And while most havens have signed on to a strong global transparency scheme for sharing banking information (called the Common Reporting Standard) that will take effect in 2017, the United States isn’t playing ball, meaning it will continue to serve as a haven for secretive foreign money. [▻http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/Tax/us-tax-notes-parillo-081715.pdf]

Britain is perhaps even worse. It runs a network of some of the world’s largest havens, from the Cayman Islands to Bermuda to Jersey. These places, the last remnants of the British Empire, are partly independent (and yes, some are quite sunny). But their legislation is approved in London, Queen Elizabeth II appoints their governors and her head graces their stamps and banknotes. A Financial Secrecy Index ranking the world’s biggest tax havens by secrecy and scale — a project I’ve been involved in — puts the United States in third place, after Switzerland and Hong Kong. If Britain were lumped in with its offshore network, though, it would rank first.

#Etats-Unis #Grande-Bretagne #Suisse #paradis_fiscaux #évasion_fiscale

Panama Papers: a massive document leak reveals a global web of corruption and tax avoidance
▻http://www.vox.com/2016/4/3/11356326/panama-papers

Even as the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations have engaged in increasingly complex and intensive efforts at international cooperation to smooth the wheels of global commerce, they have willfully chosen to allow the wealthiest members of Western society to shield their financial assets from taxation (and in many cases divorce or bankruptcy settlement) by taking advantage of shell companies and tax havens.

If Panama or the Cayman Islands were acting to undermine the integrity of the global pharmaceutical patent system, the United States would stop them. But the political elite of powerful Western nations have not acted to stop relatively puny Caribbean nations from undermining the integrity of the global tax system — largely because Western economic elites don’t want them to.

[…]

But even though various criminal money-laundering schemes are the sexiest possible use of shell companies, the day-to-day tax dodging is what really pays the bills. As a manager of offshore bank accounts told me years ago, “People think of banking secrecy as all about terrorists and drug smugglers, but the truth is there are a lot of rich people who don’t want to pay taxes.” And the system persists because there are a lot of politicians in the West who don’t particularly want to make them.

[…]

Incorporating your hedge fund in a country with no corporate income tax even though all your fund’s employees and investors live in the United States is perfectly legal. So is, in most cases, setting up a Panamanian shell company to own and manage most of your family’s fortune.

Signalé par Glenn Greenwald: A Key Similarity Between Snowden Leak and Panama Papers: Scandal Is What’s Been Legalized
▻https://theintercept.com/2016/04/04/a-key-similarity-between-snowden-leak-and-panamapapers-scandal-is-what

Proving that certain behavior is “legal” does not prove that it is ethical or just. That’s because corrupted political systems, by definition, often protect and legalize exactly the behavior that is most unjust. Vital journalism does not only expose law breaking. It also highlights how corrupted political and legal systems can be co-opted by the most powerful in order to legally sanction atrocious and destructive behavior that serves their interests, typically with little or no public awareness that it’s been done.

Highest to Lowest - Prison Population Rate | World Prison Brief
▻http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All

Ranking Title Prison Population Rate
1 Seychelles 799
2 United States of America 698
3 St. Kitts and Nevis 607
4 Turkmenistan 583
5 Virgin Islands (USA) 542
6 Cuba 510
7 El Salvador 506
8 Guam (USA) 469
9 Thailand 467
10 Belize 449
11 Russian Federation 446
12 Rwanda 434
13 Virgin Islands (United Kingdom) 425
14 Grenada 398
15 Panama 392
16 American Samoa (USA) 382
17 St. Vincent and the Grenadines 378
18 Cayman Islands (United Kingdom) 375
19 Antigua and Barbuda 373

#prison #population

Mapping the State: Ireland as you’ve never seen it

▻http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/mapping-the-state-ireland-as-you-ve-never-seen-it-1.2438285

http://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.2438284.1448038014!/image/image.jpg

‘We didn’t call it ‘the state we’re in’, or ‘look at the state of us’. It’s Mapping the State. And it’s very deliberately meant to be nonpolemical,” says JP O’Malley of Zero-G, a Dublin design agency.

He was part of the team that has created a new visual aid to help people understand and navigate Ireland’s legislative, judicial, executive and local-government structures.

It has been done using a map, but not in a way that resembles any country we know. Instead this map of the Irish State is made up of parts of countries and islands around the world – including some choice selections, such as the Cayman Islands to represent AIB.

#irlande #cartographie #visualisation #cartoexperiment

Les titres marrants de la presse norvégienne (sans commentaires) :

"Un « investisseur » milliardaire norvégien (une des plus grosse fortune norvégienne) meurt dans un accident de bateau dans les Caraïbes au large des îls Cayman"

▻http://www.nrk.no/norge/norsk-milliardaer-omkom-i-batulykke-1.12647867

Avoid the center

▻http://td-architects.eu/projects/show/avoid-the-center

Décidément, après “the walled world” Théo a fait “Avoid the center”, un projet carto très original. Ce créateur carto est absolument à suivre dans ses oeuvres, c’est tout simplement, archi-créatif, fort et superbe.

Mark (#15, 2008)

The investigation into the relationship between the size of a country and its prosperity shows that extreme dimensions are an advantage.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/hauwufvkuhlqo19/Capture%20d%E2%80%99%C3%A9cran%202015-06-12%20%C3%A0%2023.15.51.png?dl=0

By reorganizing the countries of the world according to their physical size, an interesting phenomenon emerges that shows prosperity at the edges and meagerness in the middle of the scale. The segment of the super-sized countries is dominated by Canada, USA and Australia with the vastly developing BRIC-Countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) joining in while the zone of XXS-States is dominated by countries like Luxembourg as world’s richest country and tax-havens like the Cayman Islands.
Seen in this light the European Union established itself as a perfect androgynous state that, at its will, is able to bridge this gap and appear wherever it is most suitable. Its member states can either appear as toothless dwarfs or, if the members are working together, the European Union can appear as important player amidst of world’s largest and powerful countries.

Producer: Theo Deutinger, Theresia Kohlmayr

#cartographie_radicale #visualisation #cartographie #architecture

Primary rainforest cleared for massive palm oil plantations in Peru
▻http://news.mongabay.com/2015/0520-mrn-gfrn-cannon-amazon-forest-cleared-for-palm-oil.html

More than 9,400 hectares of closed-canopy Amazonian rainforest has been removed for two oil palm plantations in the Peruvian region of Ucayali since 2011, according to scientists working for MAAP, the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project. The two plantations are linked to Czech entrepreneur Dennis Melka.

Melka is the CEO of United Cacao, a Cayman Islands-based company that has been accused by scientists and NGOs of clearing more than 2,000 hectares of primary forest for a cacao plantation in another part of Peru while claiming to espouse a “sustainable” approach. He is also the founder, director, chairman, and CEO of United Oils, headquartered in the Cayman Islands according to some associates, and is a Singapore-based “palm oil refiner” according to others. Based on the public statements of at least one American investor, it appears that United Oils has also claimed that its operations are also sustainable.

Based on an analysis of satellite images going back to 1990, a total of 12,188 total hectares of standing forest had been leveled through the end of April, MAAP reported on April 27. MAAP is an initiative by a group of scientific and conservation organizations to accessibly present technical information about threats to the Amazon.

http://mongabay-images.s3.amazonaws.com/15/0520-Nueva%20Requena%202%20Aerial-EIA-20150325-012.jpg

#déforestation #forêt #huile_de_palme

Cameron crackdown on tax havens ’purely political gesture’, says Tory peer | Politics | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/15/david-cameron-tax-havens-cayman-islands-david-maclean-lord-blencathra?C

A Conservative peer has described David Cameron’s flagship G8 anti-tax avoidance initiative as a “purely political gesture” designed to head off European attempts to curb the City of London.

Lord Blencathra, the former Tory home office minister David Maclean, who was ennobled by David Cameron in 2011, told the government of the Cayman Islands last year that the prime minister’s bid to increase transparency at offshore tax havens was an attempt to distract the #G8 and EU.

The frank statement emerges from a submission made by Maclean to a consultation on tax transparency in the Cayman Islands, written in February 2014. The letter was initially held privately by the Cayman government, but has since been made public.

#tax_avoidance #paradisfiscaux #Caimans #Cameron #transparence

Head of London-listed company linked to illegal clearing of Peru rainforest | Environment | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/07/head-of-london-listed-company-linked-to-illegal-clearing-of-peru-rainfo

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/4/7/1428411683811/bf22d548-1897-47e8-9694-f6b60dc46f73-2060x1236.jpeg

The CEO of a company listed on the London Stock Exchange, that aims to become the world’s largest producer of cocoa, is responsible for illegally clearing swathes of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon, according to a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

The website for the Cayman Islands-based company, United Cacao, implies the company could be a force for positive change in the chocolate business, mostly produced in West Africa, stating that it “seeks to provide a clear path forward for ethically-produced cacao to the world marketplace”.

But the EIA investigation alleges the company’s founder and CEO, Dennis Melka, has illegally deforested about 7,000 hectares (17,300 acres) of mostly primary rainforest. It says he is looking to expand his agricultural plantations by acquiring 450 units of rural private property in the Amazon, in addition to requesting at least 96,192 additional hectares of public land from the Peruvian government.

#cacao #déforestatation #forêt #amazonie #pérou

Loophole4All.com Wins Big Art Award and Turns into ArtCommodities.com

Press Release. June 2nd 2014, NYC.

It’s a pleasure to announce that Loophole for All won the Golden Nica,
first prize of Prix Ars Electronica, one of the most prominent awards from socially engaged media art - in Linz, Austria.
▻http://prix2014.aec.at/prixwinner/12143

Shortly: The project exposed 215,000 anonymous companies in the Cayman Islands and attempted to sell their identities in order to democratize tax shields.

In one year Loophole4All.com received:
2 Cease and Desist letters from Chinese financial firms.
10 legal threats from business owners in the Cayman Islands.
12 articles in international newspapers.
1,000 orders made through the selling of companies.
700 USD made and lost through selling the identities of Cayman Island
firms.
2 PayPal Account suspensions and a ban on trading.
25,000 investigative queries into the database of 215,000 entities.
900 subscriptions to the project???s newsletter with anonymous email
addresses or from domains like: ey.com, hsbc.com, citi.com, kcs.com, etc.

Unfortunately, PayPal didn’t concede and I lost all the money that I earned from the selling of subversive artworks in a limited edition. In the meantime, my mailbox on the Cayman Islands appears to have been shut down and I haven’t received mail there in a few months. By the way, I am not making up a single detail of the project. Read the full story here:
▻http://paolocirio.net/press/texts/text_loophole4all.php

There has finally been increased political pressure on the loopholes of
anonymous companies, so I decided to move onto the next booming financial instrument that hasn’t yet been regulated, in fact my next project taps into the art market with a promising Smart model that allows everyone to collect art and increase the value of the collections.

Today, I introduce ArtCommodities.com. The platform offers a simple
economic analysis of how value is created in contemporary art and proposes an innovative model that allows everyone to invest in art that matters with a new type of collectable object. Read more about the new model:
▻http://ArtCommodities.com/?/c/model

By turning offshore firms in art commodities, you can now buy artworks from Loophole4All.com once again. Become the only owner of unique historical artworks for 99 cents and up!

Have a look at the photos of the art installation of Loophole for All in
the following exhibitions
Show at Aksioma - Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana:
▻http://paolocirio.net/work/loophole-for-all/loophole-for-all-aksioma.php
Show Unstable Territories at CCC Strozzina in Florence:
▻http://paolocirio.net/work/loophole-for-all/loophole-for-all-strozzina.php
Show Global aCtIVISm at ZKM, Center for Art and Media, in Karlsruhe;
and Out of the Box at MAK, Museum for Applied Arts, in Vienna, some
pictures:
▻http://paolocirio.net/work/loophole-for-all/loophole-for-all-others.php

A recent video interview in Slovenia on national TV:
▻http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLHi4K92_5c

A recent interview published on The Wild Magazine:
▻http://thewildmagazine.com/blog/paolo-cirio-loophole-for-all
You can learn more about the project, its others exhibitions and
publications here:
▻http://paolocirio.net/work/loophole-for-all

Follow new and upcoming artworks and shows

Global Direct
▻http://paolocirio.net/work/global-direct
This project introduces the idea of real-time participation in world wide
governance. It’s an ambitious project, which will be ongoing for a few
months. It is a 2014 commission by Turbulence through the Jerome Foundation and It’ll be shown at Kasa Gallery in Istanbul in June and at DOX Prague in November.

Fingerprints Catalogue
▻http://DataAsCulture.org
This project is commissioned by Open Data Institute for shows at
FutureEverything and Lighthouse in UK. It makes use of sophisticated
browser tracking technology for an Anti-Social Sculpture. The fingerprints left on the catalogue and its artworks are collected for composing the display of the featured artworks.

(W)orld Currency
▻http://paolocirio.net/work/world-currency
A manipulation-proof currency through the creative formulation of an
equation and a trading algorithm. It started through a commission at the Museumsquartier in Vienna and was shown in March at Borroworrob at HDLU in Zagreb, in September it’ll be exhibited during the Digital Design Weekend at the V&A Museum in London.

Street Ghosts
New photos of Street Ghosts published on the map in Barcelona
▻http://goo.gl/maps/YDJT7 - Zagreb ▻http://goo.gl/maps/0nK19 - Lincoln
▻http://goo.gl/maps/0PCFj - Sydney UTS ▻http://goo.gl/maps/dYs3L and here a great video from The Influencers action ▻http://vimeo.com/85017360

. In september it will be installed for Making the City Playable in Bristol, at the V&A Museum in London and Eternal September for Aksioma Institute and Skuc Gallery in Ljubljana.

Face to Facebook
It’s currently being shown in Big Bang Data at CCCB Museum in Barcelona and Out of Control at Ars Electronica Center in Linz. In these installations the audience can browse the epic dating website Lovely-Faces.com! The piece will be shown also at The Photographers’ Gallery in London during this summer.

HD Stencils
▻http://paolocirio.net/work/hd-stencils
It is an experiment with laser cutters and coding. This new technique for High Resolution stencils will be used with spray paint. A few painting will be shown in Berlin in 2015. While this summer you will see those graffiti on downtown’s walls.

Direct Democracy within the Internet at Left Forum
▻http://www.leftforum.org/content/direct-democracy-within-internet
I curated this panel at the major Left-wing gathering in U.S. that
investigated the potential and limits of enhancing democracy through the Internet at John Jay College, CUNY in New York City.

Performing Change panels series
▻http://paolocirio.net/press/texts/perfoming-change.php
Don’t forget to check out the video recordings of the panel series with 14 awesome speakers that I curated at Eyebeam in NYC last October.

* I’ve also written a new artist statement about working with contemporary social complexity this year. You can read it here:
▻http://www.paolocirio.net/press/texts/paolo_cirio_statement.php

There are also some video recording of lectures I gave recently:
Berlin: ▻http://youtube.com/watch?v=7lf9lRE99ng

Amsterdam: ▻http://youtube.com/watch?v=oTWD_T4eAYA

Barcelona: ▻http://vimeo.com/83314656

Ljubljana: ▻http://vimeo.com/84716181

Many thanks for reading.
With the promise of other new explosive top-secret projects this summer!
Paolo Cirio’s press office.
▻http://PaoloCirio.net

#art #paradis_fiscaux #finance

Treasury to Crack Down on UK’s Offshore Tax Havens
►http://www.globalpolicy.org/social-and-economic-policy/international-trade-and-development-1-57/transnational-corporations/52096-treasury-to-crack-down-on-uks-offshore-tax-havens.html?itemid=id

Jamie Doward
Observer
November 24, 2012

The UK government is planning to force tax havens to reveal the names of account holders, according to this Guardian report. Similar to the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, the new changes would push the UK’s crown dependencies such as Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands to give up what was previously secret information. There is skepticism about the implementation of the plan, but if taken up, the UK’s tax transparency move could act as a stimulus for other governments restricting the billions in tax avoidance.

NHS shake-up leaves some private health firms turning to tax havens
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/mar/17/nhs-shakeup-health-firms-tax-havens

Report exposes how four of five biggest health companies that lobbied in favour of health bill can keep taxes to a minimum

►http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=4251

While in public they have been presenting themselves as the future of the NHS, a Corporate Watch investigation into the accounts and finances of five of the major private healthcare companies has found widespread use of tax havens,* including the British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Jersey, Guernsey and the Cayman Islands, and tax avoidance schemes Barclays or Vodafone accountants would be proud of.

#optimisation_fiscale

Mitt Romney has millions of dollars saved in offshore Cayman Islands tax shelters | Mail Online

Holds a reported $33 million in the Caribbean British territory’s accounts
Offshore banking could be one reason Romney is withholding his tax returns
Newt Gingrich reported 31 percent tax on his income — in line with the top tax bracket

Mitt Romney, who recently revealed he pays close to 15 percent tax on his income, has untold millions of dollars of his massive fortune saved in offshore tax shelters in the Cayman Islands, according to reports.

The Republican presidential front runner has been taking fire from tax groups and his opponents after he admitted he pays a much lower federal tax rate than most Americans.

Read more: ►http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2088608/Mitt-Romney-millions-dollars-saved-offshore-Cayman-Islands-tax-shelters