Will the fog over Albion dissipate?

David Cameron intends to make Britain a world leader in clearing the financial system from offshore

This is a blow of terrible power. That's why you need to withdraw money to an offshore and hide there if you can’t buy a castle or a football club in England on them?

The “Panama scandal” in front of the eyes becomes a “black swan”, which flew into the “quiet harbor” of global corruption. Front, British Prime Minister David Cameron, who himself was lit up in the archives of Mossack Fonseca. London, the capital of the British Empire, remains the heart of the world offshore system. Under his influence, several key jurisdictions, where British law is at the same time, which allows to effectively protect property rights and structure transactions with it, and national legislation that allows the owners to almost not share information about themselves with the rest of the world. The city itself on Thames, as well as the adjacent counties of England and Wales, is one of the world's largest locations of elite real estate, from apartments to estates with locks, the cosmic prices for which are not least of stable in demand from the beneficiaries of offshores, including with criminal corruption.

From this end, Cameron offered to go in. The next month, a single register of property rights for foreign and local companies will begin to work in the UK. The key requirement is the disclosure of real beneficiaries. As the Prime Minister’s office emphasizes, about one hundred thousand objects in Albion belong to foreign legal entities, almost half of them in London.

This is a blow of terrible power. That's why you need to withdraw money to an offshore and hide there if you can’t buy a castle or a football club in England on them?

So far there is an answer: to buy apartments in Miami or Villa on the Cote d'Azur. True, France intends to follow the example of the UK, along with the Netherlands, Australia and a dozen more jurisdictions of various calibers, from Indonesia to Afghanistan.

It is also expected that on the initiative of Cameron, the British offshore jurisdictions, including the British Virgin Islands, the Kaimanov Islands and the Norman Islands of Jersey and Gernsy in La-Channel, will soon be forced to disclose the tax and financial information.

Without submitting a British prime minister, but obviously, under the influence of the world scandal, Panama is also revealed - one of the few large offshore hosting, which was not in the orbit of the direct influence of either the United Kingdom or the United States. And here the Central American Republic (and with it - Bahrain, Vanuatu, Nauru and Lebanon) joined the international agreement on the exchange of financial information. True, a lot about Panama thanks to the publications of journalists-investigators is already known, but, firstly, there are many registrars, and not just Mossack Fonseca, and secondly, we are talking about international state cooperation with all the ensuing legal consequences.

By the way, Russia has joined the system of automatic information exchange also just the other day, and the system itself will reach the design capacity only by 2018. So those who want to have time to hide the Panama stagnacons. But where?

Reasonable and substantial options, strictly speaking, three: Singapore, Hong Kong and the USA.

The Americans can be called the main beneficiaries of the latest events without abysses. The reputation of one direct competitor, who was on the side, was destroyed, apparently, irrevocably, and the second - the main - the competitor himself announced the exit from the big offshore game. But the prospects for the transformation of state into the world offshore hegemon are also not obvious: legal risks are too great there. For example, Russians who fell under personal sanctions, it makes no sense to read the sites of real estate offices in Manhattan.

And in general, corruption becomes a kind of global warming: a universally recognized world problem. The IMF, for example, published a report according to which corruption costs the world 2% of GDP per year (this is about $ 2 trillion). And the main thing in Cameron’s initiatives: the recognition is that the most developed and attractive to the country's life is responsible for this problem no less than the states, where corruption flourishes.