Big financial brother

What threatens the accounts of Russians in Cyprus? Closing. But so far not to everyone. The opinion of Yulia Latinina

In early May, Cyprus island was visited by representatives of the US Treasury, and a few weeks after this visit, the American Central Bank sent a document to Cyprus banks, which orders to close all the accounts of offshore companies registered in the Seychelles, the British Virgin Islands and Belize.

This event gave rise to an unprecedented hype in the Russian press. In the end,

Cyprus without offshore is the same as China without rice or Tula without a samovar.

This, one might say, is nonsense. What is he at all then, Cyprus?

The case is not limited to Cyprus alone. The US Treasury Department has just contributed to cleaning the banking system of Latvia. Some banks, according to rumors, were forced to close up to 80% of deposits. Latvia enjoyed the reputation of the Russian laundry, but the ABLV bank, from which the scandal began, was injured not so much because of Russia as because of North Korea. The US Treasury said that the bank was part of a chain that ensured financing of the North Korean nuclear program.

Cyprus and Latvia are only a small part of the operation for large -scale stripping offshores, steadily carried out by the United States since 2010.

Undoubtedly, one of its objects is currently Russian money. Russian money is generally toxic: you do not have to be an ally of the Kremlin authorities, so that in any European bank you will be taken out of you all the soul. But in fact, the process is much wider. The US is stripping offshores around the world. And their main target is not Russian or North Korean, but American money.

American companies were the main engines of the new post -industrial economy. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Paypal - these are not even transnational brands, but transnational monopolies, whose income exceeds the GDP of quite decent countries. So, in 2017, Amazon received Revenue at $ 177.9 billion, Apple - 229 billion, Google - $ 89 billion. For comparison: the Czech Republic GDP is $ 205 billion, and New Zealand is 198 billion.

Theoretically, golden rain was supposed to collapse on the American economy, but this turned out to be not entirely true. The total volume of the high -tech American cache, which remained abroad, is estimated at 3.1 trillion dollars. Only Apple stores 252 billion offshores. In January 2018, thanks to changes in US tax legislation, the company promised to import this money in the United States and pay $ 38 billion.

Of course, all these offshores are quite legal: in the sense that the corporations include them in the reporting, and the tax tricks that they use are not only known to IRS (internal income service), but often agreed with the authorities. (In some American states interested in the influx of investments, civil servants who help investors usually advise: “You can legally minimize this tax in this way, and so.”)

Nevertheless, the general trend remains a trend: the US business atmosphere is magnificent, but taxes are often high. The times have long passed when in 1895 the US Supreme Court recognized the federal income tax illegal: and this tax, introduced in 1894, amounted to as many as 2 (two!) Percent. It was this extraordinary ease of taxes that gave the United States in the 19th century the opportunity to develop so quickly, but that era remained far in the past.

The obvious answer to this problem was to reduce taxes. But this answer is not very acceptable politically, especially for the Democrats, and since the election of President Obama, the struggle with offshore was given a green light. In 2010, the United States accepted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, according to which foreign financial institutions had to disclose the accounts, identities and assets of potential American taxpayers. More than a hundred countries, including such offshore jurisdictions as Bermuda and the Kaymanov Islands, agreed or pretended to agree with the law.

Since then, the opening of foreign accounts has turned into torment for the Americans.

The first thing that is now asking a person who decided to open an account somewhere in France or Switzerland: "Are you not an American citizen?" Most likely, they simply will not open an account to him.

It is noteworthy that at the same time the only free country that the Dragon demands of the IRS USA do not apply to the United States themselves. If Bermuda is forced to disclose all the information about real beneficiaries of accounts before IRS, then the American bank is not obliged to do this. As a result, it is easier to keep money now not in Cyprus and not in kayman, but in Nevada and Wyoming.

As a result of US pressure on European and offshore jurisdictions, more and more money is in the United States. The struggle against dirty Russian money is only one of the small episodes of this universal deoffshorization that has been coming since 2010.

Probably, after 15–20 years, the current financial system will change radically. Offshores will be a thing of the past or at least in cyberspace. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies will come to the place of offshore.

Another question is that the changes taking place are not necessarily a good. An absolutely transparent world with a big financial brother is at the head more frighten than pleasing.

In the free world there are a huge number of activists who are fighting the growing omniscience of the state. They are frightened by phones that track movement, cookies, collecting data on our Internet officials, CCTV (video surveillance cameras) on the streets. However, these activists never protest against violation of financial Privacy, because to protest against this from the point of view of the modern left -wing establishment is to fight for dirty money.

In fact, interference in private financial life is the most fundamental intervention that the state can only afford.

Where and how you keep money - it is much more important than which site you went to yesterday.

The body that owns such information is actually the embryo of the very World Government, which, we can hope, will never be born, because, having born, it will sooner or later become a final bureaucracy. Absolute bureaucracy. The total bureaucracy, which will overshadow any bureaucracy of the Chinese Empire or the Soviet Union.

Undoubtedly, there are a lot of dirty money in offshore. But most of them appear there not because their owners are trading in drugs or taking bribes, but for the simple reason that in the modern world, drug dealers and bribe takers are earlier, thank God, much less IT giants. Corporations leave money in offshore, because in modern democracies the number of voters significantly exceeds the number of taxpayers. To crush offshore instead of reducing taxes is not a solution to the problem.

However, this issue has only an indirect attitude to Russian dirty money. The Russian owners of Cyprus accounts, Beliz companies can only “thank” the Kremlin for his foreign policy, which led to the fact that Russian money has become temporarily even more important than the US Ministry of Finance.