Ive had money offshore in the IoM, and i know HMRC knew all about it before i did almost, i got a number wrong by 100 pounds on interest and the tax man told me - it was in my favour too :-0

I can just see the chinese telling the americans about details of their investments :-)

Theres a recent story about Gda and the EU, Gda was put on a laundering blacklist because it wouldnt divulge eu citizen investment info to the eu as an annual complete list. The gda govt complained, said it didnt have the info but they would happily allow the eu to get info from the banks, so they got upgraded from black to grey.

Subsequently the banks have agreed to hand over the details for any identified eu citizen that can be identified, [betting that not many can] but individually as requested, and with a big fat fee for doing it :-)

Hmm, isnt the vatican itself a tax haven? I thought the papal finances were vast and obfuscated, prettŷ much tax free once managed within the vatican. There is rumour that the recent Leonardo auctioned might have gone to the church but they were concerned about the public reaction to several hundred million in cash appearing from nowhere and being spent on a bauble. Mind you there are some serious issues with the house of Saud owning it too, images of their icons being taboo, and the concept that it was given to the new ruler as a gift, almost bankrupting the buyer though buying huge kudos.

Will it all end in another tea party? It is after all about britain wanting to tax said beneficial owners. Smart money seems to be going to hong kong where the muricans and eurocrats are ignored.

I have a relative in banking IT who tells me the writings on the wall now for large swaths of the offshore [and onshore] financial world, and governments will largely lose control and the ability to tax the agile, its the unstoppable rise of the smart young IT entrepreneur. There are huge disruptive technologies in play.

Bitcoin is the baby of the future of crypto currencies, its the wild west now but give it 10 years. The banks might embrace some of it but imho will be bypassed by it completely in time. The big tech sellers like amazon and facebook are starting to facilitate peer to peer payments [often using packaged crypto behind the curtains] which will also bypass the banks.

When the ‘amazon pound’ is more stable than most currencies, backed as it is by a company itself bigger than national economies, when the new country ‘amazon’ is purchased [they could in theory win an election - guarantee to pay off a countries debts, cut taxes, and enter a new world of business - eg ‘buy’ a caribbean country, agree duty reducing deals as a country and buy seats at the global table] and its investors then use their finance to invest in companies directly, where does that leave the banks? At some point, share trading will also begin to bypass official markets. Is this the ultimate offshoring?

Does this excite or frighten? Are you buying krugerrands and putting them under the bed or investing in crypto startups [please dont, the winning solution is in the head of a 16 year old in california.]

By the bye - a young uk guy was sent to prison for 10 years yesterday. He was arrested by a team if 20! Officers on a train into london. They got his laptop before he locked it, and found 20 million id/password pairs, banking details for a million people and similar stuff on it, he was running a number of global scams and had 10 million in bank accounts. Its thought he has close to a thousand people working indirectly for him in the ivory coast and nigeria. I’d employ him in IT.

As I've written elsewhere, Cayman will never seek independence from Britain. For one thing, it would be the immediate end of its offshore-finance status. For another, the CIA would have its feet on the Governor's desk two minutes after the Union Jack came down!

As for buying Bitcoin... Warren Buffet says his golden rule is never to buy something he doesn't understand. I believe he's right about that; and I don't understand crypto-currencies. I know what they are, but I don't understand how they can possibly be safe from counterfeiters. So I wouldn't buy any as a store of value. As a currency, to buy and sell things, well... it'll be a while before that happens in small islands! And I will say the same about gold. The day may come when I can give a Krugerrand to my supermarket and say "tell me when my credit runs out", but I doubt it, in my lifetime. First, of course my supermarket would need to employ a professional assayer and his kit, to make sure customers' coins were really 100% gold!

Always glad to know another fan of the sage of Omaha :-). I do agree.

We do however continue to live in interesting times. We wont know till after the event, but i confidently predict we will reach the technological singularity last week to the next 5 years. This means true AI will take off exponentially, and depending on how/who we either all die, or inherit any one of a number of huge advances. Id very happily settle for fusion power, the end of workd hunger or teleportation.

If you want to know how it might go wrong, theres an episode of the black mirror tv series on netflix called bad dog [scary thing is, they are almost ready now - boston dynamics makes them]... Or read blood music by greg bear.

Black Mirror launches with robo-dogs that hunt people | Daily Mail Online

Sadly we all die in the story... If you make a nasty military tool, make it inaccessible and if tampered with it explodes, this is the result. Not new, some of the british bombs in WW2 were so equipped. The germans were far more gentlemanly, they registered all the patents on their dodgy fuses with the british patents office :-)

Have you seen a boston dynamics dog robot? Scary or what?