openpolitics.com

They know more about their clients than the clients’ own wives. They are loyal in the face of appalling behaviour. They are the brains behind the most ingenious tax avoidance schemes. And there are more of them than ever

.. These professionals not only shelter wealth from taxation but, in the words of one academic paper, serve to “obscure concentrations of economic power”, using vehicles that make it difficult, if not impossible, to identify the true owners of wealth.

.. In 2003, the now-retired Democrat senator Carl Levin complained to a US Senate subcommittee about the asset-holding structures created by wealth managers to obscure their clients’ assets: “Most are so complex that they are Megos – ‘My Eyes Glaze Over’ type of schemes. Those who cook up these concoctions count on their complexity to escape scrutiny and public ire.”

.. As world wealth has grown to record levels in recent years – to an estimated $241 trillion – inequality has also grown, with 0.7% of the global population owning 41% of the assets.

.. Doing so involves creating not just asset-holding and tax-avoidance structures but a new body of transnational institutions, which are expanding outside of any democratic process of checks and balances. In this way, the rise of the super-rich and the wealth management industry is creating an elite who are increasingly ungoverned and ungovernable.

.. the Channel Islands tax haven of Jersey had detained, deported, and ultimately banned a reporter from Newsweek magazine for investigating claims of illegal activity there.

.. Remarkably, the local financial authorities were so well connected that they managed to bar the reporter not only from re-entering Jersey but also from entering the United Kingdom, period.

.. The super-rich are often extremely sceptical about the motives of people around them. “People who have a lot of money can become very suspicious and isolated,” Robert, who works in Guernsey, told me. “They become convinced that everyone who meets them is trying to take advantage of them.”

.. A century ago, wealth managers’ clients were known collectively as “the leisure class”, a group that probably numbered in the low four figures, concentrated in North America and Europe. These days they are far more diverse, and distributed all over the world. Today’s client base includes the world’s 167,669 “ultra-high-net-worth individuals” – people who, according to the 2014 World Wealth Report by the management consultancy Cap-Gemini, have at least $30m in investable assets.

.. their role is to be “part lawyer, part tax adviser, part accountant and part investment adviser all rolled into one”. For international transactions, wealth managers also need to assemble and coordinate a team of advisers. In this sense, wealth managers are more like general contractors: responsible for executing the client’s strategic plan, but reliant on a team of subcontractors for highly specialised parts of the job.

.. This trust-corporation configuration allows assets to be transferred back and forth in what Forbes once characterised as a “shell game extraordinaire”. Skilful wealth managers can use tools such as trusts, foundations and corporations to thwart the aims of the state almost indefinitely, without breaking any laws.

.. Bruce, an American working in Geneva, said that his primary source of job satisfaction was the “intellectual challenge of playing cat and mouse with tax authorities around the world”.

.. But a much more common reason that wealth managers give for enjoying their job is that it is not just intellectually challenging, but emotionally fulfilling.

.. On the Arabian Peninsula, they are now routinely asked to mitigate the disadvantages that Islamic law imposes on the inheritance rights of daughters. Since sharia also tightly limits testamentary freedom – the degree to which individuals can choose how their assets are distributed after their death – those who wish their daughters to have an equal share of the family fortune must find offshore alternatives.

.. almost every participant in the study mentioned “helping families” as a major source of satisfaction.

.. Within the world of wealth management, being obliged to honour debts, pay the costs of government, and otherwise obey the laws of the land are often seen as offences to liberty. One training textbook describes the claims of creditors as “risks”, rather than obligations that borrowers take on voluntarily. Other threats include the legal system itself, regulation and, of course, taxation.

.. In Treasure Islands, his study of offshore financial centres, Nicholas Shaxson describes this as a world of “members of ancient continental European aristocracies, fanatical supporters of American libertarian writer Ayn Rand,

.. The economist Gabriel Zucman has argued that the offshore financial system has grown to the point that it calls into question the future of national sovereignty. His argument is based primarily on tax avoidance, which he calls “theft pure and simple”. By allowing taxpayers to steal from their governments to the tune of $200bn in worldwide lost tax revenue each year, he argues, wealth managers dramatically undermine the power of the state.

.. Jersey “is not a country”, rather, it is “45 square miles of self-governing ambiguity”.

.. If political leaders are interested in making elites pay their fair share of tax and submit to the rule of law, they should perhaps shift their attention from those who possess vast wealth and onto the people who serve them.