Name: How The Wealthy Hide Billions Using Tax Havens
Uploaded: 2018-05-18T08:25:03.000Z
Duration: 5 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

- [Narrator] In 2016, 11.5 million files were leaked

from Mossack Fonseca, the world's fourth largest

Hundreds of thousands of offshore entities

and shell companies connected to over 200 countries

Prominent world leaders, politicians, business people

and the super wealthy were exposed to have been using

offshore accounts for tax avoidance and other purposes.

that the US could be using for infrastructure,

law enforcement, healthcare or education is missing.

in places like the British Virgin Islands.

- Setting up a shell company is really quite easy.

or the British Virgin Islands or Delaware or Nevada

and usually the places where you're doing it

have tough laws where they will not reveal

who the beneficial owner is and they just layer on

So for example, you could have fake directors

where you pay a little bit extra and someone pretends

Just because you have a shell company does not mean

necessarily that you're doing anything illegal.

Say for example, you wanna have some business activities

but you don't want certain business partners to know

The more normal one is some form of legal tax avoidance.

think that tax evasion and tax avoidance is something

that happens in a far off place with palm trees

that something like 300 billion dollars a year

Foreigners are coming in and buying up property

but some of it is clearly money laundering

and corrupt officials and other people using their cash

to park it in property and making it impossible

for the people who live there to afford it.

that it doesn't have enough money for infrastructure

or for healthcare or for police or for education

and at the same time, there's just huge amounts

of tax avoidance and tax evasion going on

- [Narrator] Of the 214,000 entities identified

in the Panama Papers, about one half of them are located

How did this tiny area become such a huge tax haven?

Mossack Fonseca is a Panama based law firm founded in 1977.

After instability in Panama was pushing clients away

the British Virgin Islands were ripe new territory

these anonymous shell companies and make them available

In the beginning, that's a great business model, right,

you create this anonymous shell company, you give it a name,

you don't care who actually is behind it and you stick it

until a year passes and it's time to invoice

Governments start to realize that these are being used

by criminals and money launderers and things like that

and so they say, "We need more information."

And I asked Jurgen Mossack, "Did you ever see that wonderful

"I Love Lucy episode where she's in the chocolate factory

"and she's trying to keep up with the conveyor belt

It was very much like that at a certain point.

- [Narrator] So we know it's a big problem

- There's a lot of bureaucratic inertia and timidity

But another big part of it is that Congress has eviscerated

the IRS and they've starved it of funds, there's been a lot

of retirements and so you've deliberately hobbled the IRS

and made it impossible for them to go after this kind

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How The Wealthy Hide Billions Using Tax Havens

reveal

crisis

deliberately

infrastructure