Eric Zuesse
Barbados, Seychelles, Bahamas, Cyprus, St, Vincent, and St. Lucia, are all leading tax-havens, to hide wealth from being taxed. And, for example, Seychelles grants “complete immunity from prosecution in criminal proceedings and the protection of assets from forfeiture even if investment were earned as a result of crimes”. Moreover, most tax-havens were established by the British Empire: Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Virgin Islands, Gibraltar, Turks and Caicos Islands, Anguilla, Montserrat, Jersey, Guernsey, Dominica, and Isle of Man — all of them are. Furthermore, some of the main tax-havens aren’t even listed among the 180 TI-rated nations. Examples of this are Nauru, Cook Islands, and Liechtenstein; and that’s like a signal for billionaires to ‘earn’ their money in such places, since those are especially obscure locales for tax-collectors to look for offshore wealth. So much, then, for ‘Transparency International’.
EXPLANATION OF HOW INDIVIDUAL COUNTRY SCORES OF THE CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX ARE CALCULATED
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[Jeffrey] Sachs wasn't the only Harvard professor in Moscow in the summer and fall of 1991. No fewer than four university affiliates -- the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Russian Research Center, HIID and the economics department -- were represented. Graham Allison, the founding dean of the Kennedy School, was pushing an updated version of the 500 Days plan with its co-author, liberal economist Grigory Yavlinsky. Marshall Goldman, the director of Harvard's venerable Russian Research Center and a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union for decades, was providing counsel to various parties. Sachs, thanks to his experience in Poland, emerged as the leading figure among these notables. In Moscow he encountered yet another Harvard colleague, Andrei Shleifer. Shleifer had been sent to Moscow by the World Bank, where Summers, on leave from Harvard, was serving as chief economist. Shleifer possessed a distinct advantage over other Westerners: He was a native of Russia and fluent in the language, having been born there in 1961. His parents were engineers, a profession the state chose for them. Shleifer revealed at an early age that he was ambitious; in a photograph taken when he was six, he is dressed as a Soviet Army general. When a friend transferred to one of the best schools in Moscow, Shleifer bicycled there and didn't leave until he had persuaded the principal to admit him as well.
The World Bank was in on the scheme ever since TI’s very inception. The Summers-led World Bank gave birth to TI in 1993.
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This was just one part of U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush’s scheme, which he first instructed to the U.S. regime’s vassal leaders privately, on the night of 24 February 1990. TI is follow-through, on that, from Bush, but perpetrated under Clinton, and Bush II and Obama and Trump thereafter.
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches by historian Eric Zuesse
ERIC ZUESSE, Senior Contributing Editor • Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.
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