CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

38 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
neither founders nor beneficiaries are responsible for liabilities of the foundation.
Once again, anonymity reigns; founders and beneficiaries, as well as
operations of the foundation, can almost always be fully concealed. Liechtenstein
and Panama, among other countries, offer these vehicles, typically
suited for wealthy individuals hiding assets and escaping taxes.
Speaking of liabilities, dummy corporations are also useful places to
dump nonperforming assets. If you’ve gotten overextended and need to
clean up a financial statement, just swap your junk for securities in some
fancy-sounding financial corporation in a tax haven. You know your securities
are worthless, but other lenders and shareholders do not. Enron and Parmalat
are your models here.
Now the United States is encouraging havens and secrecy jurisdictions
to keep up with the owners of IBCs and PICs and is trying to insist on mutual
legal assistance and cooperation in specific tax and criminal matters.
This just means that you want to maintain a friendly and profitable relationship
with your offshore facilitator, so he will use that flee clause or other devices
if needed to protect your interests.
IBCs, PICs, offshore trusts, and private foundations make it possible for
you to disguise, shelter, move, and accumulate money that is unseen, unregulated,
and untaxed. With these devices and techniques, you can join millions
of others who beat the system every day.
Faking It
So far, I’ve been talking about transactions where prices are falsified and
money moved through layers of disguised entities. Another way to accomplish
very much the same end is by faking the transaction itself, in part or in
whole. In other words, you can manipulate the reality of the transaction
rather than the price of the transaction and still generate the illegal money
that moves across borders undetected.
For example, cooperating buyers and sellers can agree to vary counts,
weights, or measures as necessary to accomplish a shift of funds. Ten thousand
tons of tropical hardwoods being shipped out of Indonesia can be
documented as 6,000 tons, with the value of the extra 4,000 tons paid into
a foreign bank account. A small tanker can take on 20,000 tons of oil by
day, then the crew can repaint the water line of the vessel, load another
10,000 tons by night, and steam out of the harbor the next day unnoticed.