Vexed Bermoothes

The Guardian has taken up the banner against the offshores, with some exuberant charges of criminality and piracy.

These vile tax havens have had their day

I will leave the polemics for another day, because the world in which politicians regarded tax havens as necessary adjuncts to the all-powerful financial markets has crashed, and overdue reform may be coming … [followed by polemic] … Tax havens allow multinationals and local kleptomaniacs to siphon off Africa’s wealth to Guernsey, Jersey and their competitors. So widespread has the looting by the African elite become, that a study for the Tax Justice Network concluded that the hell holes of sub-Saharan Africa were a ‘net creditor to the rest of the world’. The dismantling of offshore finance is a necessary precondition for African development.

Even in this crisis, the UK government still offers refuge to pinstriped pirates

If you want to know why Britain has never completed the process of decolonisation, look at two lists side by side. One is the official register of tax havens, compiled by the OECD. The other is the list of British overseas territories and crown dependencies. Over a quarter of the world’s tax havens are British property… Were Britain to release its remaining colonies, they would quickly succumb to pressure from the Obama government and the European countries trying to stamp out international evasion and organised crime.