New facts about the leadup to the Beirut explosion
occrp.org
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No invasion or bombing of any country is going to affect the facilitation of terrorist funding anywhere near the action of restricting trade for companies that have these byzantine ownership structures that shield the actual owners and profiteers from identification. Anything other than shutting this farcical, gaping, cargo-ship sized hole in "international business" is, purely and simply, only theatrical effort against terrorism. It's actually worse than that because it's appearing to do something; claiming that efforts are being made, whilst it continues unabated.
Most of the intelligence and terrorism laws that were set in place specifically target non-americans and international surveillance so I don't really get your point.
There is literally no participant in the article who has any connection to the United States, not even the city involved. It’s likely given the dramatis personae that none of them may ever have set foot in the US in their lives. Yet somehow this is a matter of US law???
And how again is this somehow connected with some incident on the other side of the planet 20 years ago?
If you only think the intelligence apparatus of the US only watches within the border of the country that's a bit naive. Especially after what we know about the Snowden leaks (International submarine cables tapped, dragnet like collection of communications in all countries,...). The fact that there's no Americans involved is irrelevant to the question in this case.
With 911 it became crystal clear that this also obscures monetary flow of deadly criminal actors, deadly at scale and deadly at random targets, 911, Madrid, ...
Wouldn't you think that this would change policies and create a push to more transparency of monetary flow?
Currently the policy values the option of tax evasion at scale higher than the option of controlling in the sense of understanding money flow.
Nobody can snap their fingers and change how every country in the globe regulates their businesses though. The basic principle of companies owning other companies is too fundamental to abolish, and if you can create one link then you can make chains and these can be complex. There are no magic wands to solve this, so it's going to take perseverance and hard work, and continuing pressure on politicians.
BTW, that's quite a myth. There were never bank accounts where the banks didn't know who the client was. But not everybody at the banks had access to the info what account belonged to which person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered_bank_account
Of course if you as a foreign country could get info about your own citizens having bank accounts is a different question (and that has luckily changed in recent years).
Making the US the largest tax haven in the world.
* https://fsi.taxjustice.net/en/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Secrecy_Index
Seems that South Dakota is very popular for it:
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/the-great-amer...
The sea is not 'owned' by any country and changing the existing regulations that work (for some form of 'work', but one that is stable in a large context) with something else that works better is an iterative process with a very long iteration time.
But all the ports are. Come up with rules, and just dont let ships dock if the owners of the ship dont follow the rules
Doesnt seem that tricky.
Do remember that the bigger problem here wasn't a sea-unworthy ship that had to be impounded, but the fact the explosives were not safely stored or disposed of. That's not directly the fault of the ship's owner.
Or is sold to the highest bidder like like any other 'proceeds of crime' government auction.
I think that's precisely why the substance was there in Beirut anyway - it HAD been confiscated.
"No invasion or bombing of any country is going to affect the facilitation of terrorist funding anywhere near the action of restricting trade for companies that have these byzantine ownership structures that shield the actual owners and profiteers from identification"
Jo: Question 1: Can I trace ownership of the ship and the goods it's transporting?
Dwight: It's complicated
Jo: Yeah, but you see... it's not.I doubt they will. Most likely outcome is their tax consultants will have to get craftyer. Closing loopholes and tax havens is a continuous game of whack a mole where the authorities are always a step behind.
If that's the case, then I believe you're mistaken. This incident would be a good catalyst for any (90% or 10%) country to ensure their ports are more secure.
(I'm aware of the breathlessness of the comment, and I was going to edit it tone it down a bit, but people had already started replying - I'll stand by it as-is.)
In the financial world, there definitely is. Because of how 9/11 was bankrolled, AML laws were severely tightened. Quoting the subject line of the relevant EU directive [1]:
"[...] prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorist financing"
Which is the point that the grandparent was getting to.
Edit: To be more specific, in today's financial world, technically, shell companies should be pointless because any bank transacting with such a company is required to know the beneficial owner, ie the natural person ultimately behind that company (no matter how many layers).
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
It's also pretty easy to buy a passport and create a fake identity.
And not that much harder to create nominee directors who will never be vetted. And/or to create "legitimate" businesses with interests in art, property, and other high-value items - including in-game currencies - which can be used to transfer assets in creative ways.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/money-laundering-hmrc-tax-up...
And if you've been following the history of Wirecard you'll understand how easy it is to create a legitimate cover story for what appear to have been some rather less legitimate background operations.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/07/18/wor...
And even if you go with a traditional bank, KYC is mostly box ticking. And some of the biggest banks have been directly implicated in money laundering, AML laws and all.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-exa...
An eight figure net worth is not even close when it comes to considering starting an own bank.
Furthermore, offshore today means just one thing: "red flag". Because of AML rules, the list of Non-Cooperative Countries or Territories [1], and FATCA/CRS reporting, the only people still going through the hassle of using offshore to hide something are people who really want to hide something -- hence the red flag.
Finally, banks don't exist by themselves. They need other banks to partner and transaction with. For example: say you are a bank in the British Virgin Islands. Now try to buy stock on the NYSE. For that, you need a bank with access, and no bank with access would partner with some shady outfit.
> And if you've been following the history of Wirecard
Wirecard is a scandal beyond comparison. It is unfathomable to me how this could have gone on so long.
To contrast that, working for a bank myself, I was involved in numerous audits by financial regulators, and you wouldn't believe the level of detail they went into. Any flaw or inconsistency -- no matter how trivial, at what org level, or even across levels or topics -- was brought up.
But perhaps that was just coincidence, and we had the luck of being audited by most the diligent of auditors.
> And even if you go with a traditional bank, KYC is mostly box ticking.
Absolutely not true, at least not with the banks I'm familiar with (and our peer group services mainly high-net-worth clients).
Every single client can be subject of an AML audit. Any irregularity in a record will be construed as an overall failure of AML policies in the institution. You don't just "tick the boxes" with high-risk clients. Background checks happen. Plausibility checks happen.
> And some of the biggest banks have been directly implicated in money laundering, AML laws and all.
Laws cannot prevent crime, they can only deter crime. Yes, big banks are occasionally still involved in money laundering, but compare this to 20 years ago. The incentives are diminishing.
there are many credit unions with < $1 million in assets.
Swiss, Czech bearer instrument companies were a thing pretty recently. Cypriot trusts were a thing just a few years ago (maybe still are?). Or do you define offshore as only those weird and incomprehensible third world countries half a world away? I'm pretty sure people thought the lists were meaningful in 2013, too, and yet they have grown since then -- and the structures used to get around them have changed as well.
The whole subthread is somewhat meaningless in the context of the article, though, because it would be ridiculous to expect Lebanon to have the same level of insight into company ownership as say, Austria, Germany, or the US.
> the only people still going through the hassle of using offshore to hide something are people who really want to hide something -- hence the red flag.
Offshore means tax optimization, and anonymous companies may be nothing more than an attempt at keeping competition from guessing your game plan. E.g. real estate investors. I suppose those might be red flags in countries with funny ideas about taxation (the US, parts of Europe).
> Wirecard is a scandal beyond comparison. It is unfathomable to me how this could have gone on so long.
I take it you haven't heard about the HSBC's drug cartel money laundering? From the perspective of a small business, stuff like that makes KYC/AML look like unneeded and annoying security theatre.
> Swiss, Czech bearer instrument companies were a thing pretty recently. Cypriot trusts were a thing just a few years ago (maybe still are?).
Not sure about the bearer instrument part (especially with the Czech Republic being subject to EU rules), but I'm quite familiar with the Cypriot trusts, and (1) banks must know their Beneficial Owners and (2) those BOs do get reported to their home countries with FATCA resp. CRS reporting.
And of course, you're right -- there are still ways to get around them. But those ways have become increasingly difficult, to the point where many banks simply don't bother with that business segment anymore because the headaches outweigh the potential profits. Getting past a red flag, while operating legally is not impossible, but why bother.
> The whole subthread is somewhat meaningless in the context of the article, though, because it would be ridiculous to expect Lebanon to have the same level of insight into company ownership as say, Austria, Germany, or the US.
That's a fair argument. I have to admit that I interpreted the question more in the sense that someone (not necessarily Lebanon) should have this information.
> Offshore means tax optimization, and anonymous companies may be nothing more than an attempt at keeping competition from guessing your game plan. E.g. real estate investors. I suppose those might be red flags in countries with funny ideas about taxation (the US, parts of Europe).
Hiding something from the competition, or other nosy parties, is my best guess as well. There are legitimate ways of optimizing taxes, but it's become increasingly difficult to hide assets from your home government. (The running joke is that the United States is the last tax haven, as it's the only country not to share information with other countries.)
> I take it you haven't heard about the HSBC's drug cartel money laundering? From the perspective of a small business, stuff like that makes KYC/AML look like unneeded and annoying security theatre.
I'm familiar with that one, and many others. Wirecard in my opinion still stands by far because there were credible reports of malfeasance going back years, and BaFin went after the reporters instead.
As I said earlier, these laws can't prevent crime, they can only deter it. You're still going to have bad actors, at many possible levels (even at the C-level, as we saw with Wirecard).
It's just become increasingly difficult, with diminishing payoffs. Coming back to the original statement I was challenging: doing shady stuff post-9/11 was far more difficult than pre-9/11, and it's become even more difficult since (although admittedly, the recent development is motivated by taxation).
You're right, the amount is much lower than that. Source: know a group that bought a bank.
But then you own a bank, and have to be in full regulatory compliance, which today is an immense burden. You need an officer for this, a responsible person for that, you need risk management, accounting, etc.
My argument is that nobody with 8 figures net worth would put up with that hassle just to hide an investment (because you can do that with comparatively less hassle by other means), but if someone is willing to actually operate that bank, why not.
What does 9/11 got to do with it?
The Wikipedia page on money laundering [2] details the consequences of 9/11 on regulation quite well. The keyword there is the "Financial Action Task Force", whose recommendations the EU directive aimed to implement.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:32...
I don't want to sound insensitive, 3 thousand people is of course a tragedy, but on a scale of entire Earth I think it is preposterous for US citizens to get obsessed after this one when more kids are dying to malaria every single day or for multitude of other problems.
Looking from my point of view, it is that US rallies for some causes where it seems to suit US interests. There are so many countries that need help but in recent years whether a country gets US presence seems largely dependent on whether there is oil there and US is all too happy to turn their face away if the government of the oil-rich country is collaborating with US. This is a sore to many eyes and I just can't help to remember it whenever I hear of US trying to seem to be beneficiary in something.
This unfortunately adds fire to the trouble in the Middle East. If you are islamic radical it is extremely easy to recruit people by showing them factual, real, undeniable misbehavior of US. This lack of moral grounding is exactly the reason why actions by US do not bring expected effects. Local population treats US forces with resentment not because they are fundamentally anti-US but because they see US as a corrupt replacement for their current corrupt government.
A larger lesson is that you want somebody teach virtuous behavior you need to be able to show the virtue yourself or you are not going to achieve very much in terms of results.
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Also, my experience about downvotes is this kind of comment even if genuinely to show what's an example of sentiment outside of US, will typically get a lot of upvotes during US night time and then gets suddenly killed when US wakes up.
Just an interesting thing I noticed which, for me, validates the whole point that US doesn't like to acknowledge resentment it gets from most of the world and that US problems aren't actually the same as world problems regardless of how US would like to portray it.
But death is just one aspect. The kids could be better educated and really, this doesn't cost as much as one would portray especially now with remote schooling when a single teacher can "service" a large number of kids with no need for physical presence. The technology is there, we just need a little push to make better use of it. Better educated populations tend to produce less violence and I like to think better future.
Singling out US and US citizens for this is wrong and unfair.
What I am talking about is a series of bad decisions with repercussions that should be predictable. I mean, if you constantly cheat and are dishonest with family you live with it is no surprise that at some point they will stop liking you? Don't act stupid repeating how good and fantastic you are. Don't blame the family for not liking you. If you want people to genuinely like you then start acting the part without strings attached and hidden interests.
This is like saying it’s preposterous to get obsessed with kids dying from malaria when more people die from heart disease.
You can care about more than one thing.
Not surprising the one tragedy that happened in front of our faces on national television affected us a lot.
The tragedy is when somebody's life is cut short well before their natural end for reasons that could be easily fixed / avoided if we just applied ourselves better.
That is why heart disease and malaria are two entirely different things in my opinion. Heart disease happens mostly to older people who had their entire life to make right choices but were maybe, like me, too lazy to do it, while kids who die of malaria are basically completely innocent and had no saying or influence on their situation.
It also seems fighting malaria is much easier than fighting heart disease.
Now, I agree that we could and should do better to invest more into researching how we can make advanced age more satisfying to population of the earth and this means also learning how to help with heart problems en masse and not just to people who have enough funds to get adequate care and enough intelligence to prevent large portion of the risk in the first place.
Malaria is just one of the examples. I don't say we should put everything away and just focus on it. I would like that we identified where we could spend a relatively small portion of GDP to get a lot of good. Just imagine how much good could happen if entire world spent 5 times more money on health and health-related research than on military. Would you be willing to spend 10% of your income to get better health and longer when you are old? I would, for sure.
You mean ... like 9/11?
Dude, from my point of view as an American citizen, I agree.
>will typically get a lot of upvotes during US night time and then gets suddenly killed when US wakes up.
I don't know about the downvotes, but you're presenting a false equivalency that doesn't make any sense and is kind of insulting to me as an American. Specifically about Malaria, which a US president has created a program to address https://www.usaid.gov/global-health/health-areas/malaria. America sends billions of dollars worth of aid and supplies around the world every year. But to hear Europeans talk about it, the only thing America does is cause problems for them with our imperialism.
Sometimes I wish America would just listen to Europe and let them fend for themselves. Let their navies handle global piracy and securing global shipping lanes for their interests. Let their armies deal with Russian and Chinese saber rattling and the effect that will have on trade. Sometimes I wish I could go back and tell the government to let European militaries spend their own money to launch and maintain GPS systems that the entire western world has been given and using for the past 40 years, paid for by American taxpayers.
>A larger lesson is that you want somebody teach virtuous behavior you need to be able to show the virtue yourself or you are not going to achieve very much in terms of results.
Very ironic, since you're doing the same thing to America / Americans. What part of you and your society is so virtuous that you feel the need to give America a lesson on how to be virtuous?
Would bad things happen? Of course! Different bad things than happen now, perhaps. Then again, maybe a lot of the same bad things. Would good things happen? Who could doubt it? How absurd to think that everything is better if controlled by the US.
And, as a USian, I'm willing to accept lessons on virtue from any corner. When you reach a point that you think nobody has anything to teach you, you're cooked. Virtue lives everywhere in the world. Seek it out. Foster it. Let it foster you. Virtue cannot be monopolized.
If that's the case, prepare to accept lessons from phony, hypocritical people, because in my experience those are the ones most eager to hand out lessons on virtue to all comers.
> When you reach a point that you think nobody has anything to teach you, you're cooked
Learning new knowledge is an entirely different dish than moral teachings. I'm 100% willing to admit it when I'm wrong and learn new facts and perspectives from all people, even folks that I have fundamental disagreements with.
But I'm also very unlikely to accept any kind of teachings on "virtue" from such people. I find them generally to be not virtuous.
Actually virtual people tend to be more humble, and you have to seek out their input.
By the way, as you likely know, it's illegal now in your country to even mention the fact that Poles willingly participated in the Holocaust in such places (whereas I'm free to describe My Lai and Abu Ghraib).
Right now, the US has power, and often misuses it just like Poland has at times when it has had power. China often misuses its power. It's almost like there's something to do with power, abuse, and corruption.
> it is that US rallies for some causes where it seems to suit US interests
Let me introduce you to the concept of the nation-state.
> to get obsessed after this one when more kids are dying to malaria every single day or for multitude of other problems.
For the same reason as we treat murder victims differently than people who die from some tragic but preventable disease. Are those two on the same moral plane to you?
> validates the whole point that US doesn't like to acknowledge resentment it gets from most of the world
Interestingly, the US is up and awake, yet you have not been downvoted into grey, and many of the comments disagreeing with you have been. So you were wrong here.
Edit: To the folks downvoting because I mentioned downvotes, I respect and applaud your adherence to HN guidelines. But please be sure to downvote the parent comment for moral consistency, since he brought it up in the first place.
Do you know what happened in Jedwabne? That was not an organized nation state attack on its minority, it was pent up hate in the local population that was released with an aggreement of o Nazi occupation force because people felt they can do whatever they want and decided to act on their hatred.
For hundreds of years Poland did not govern its own territory and was split between neighbors who were not interested in resolving any of the growing problems between minorities and poles.
At the time of Jedwabne Poland as nation state did not exist, the government was truly symbolic, on emigration. Before II WW there was barely 20 years of Polish government during which time there was much other problems (ever heard of Russia invading Poland after WW1?) There was in fact a lot of racism towards Jews in that time but no organized efforts or pogroms. This only came after the government was removed and replaced by Nazi occupation.
If you compare it to current US situation, if the government stopped working completely, I am sure as hell there would be civil war between white and black population. Without damper from effective government there would be no more civility that was here during Nazi occupation.
Also, regardless,
one nation state abusing power is no excuse for another doing the same.
Resolving any kind of problem with a background of hostilities must start with ceasing of at least some of them. You can't keep escalating the conflict under pretense the other side did that in the past and call yourself peace force at the same time.
Yes, I'm well aware. That's a perfect example of absolute power. The local populace were free to do as they wanted, with no constraints.
BTW, do you know what happened in Iraq? It was "pent-up anger" about 9/11, directed at the wrong people.
But as you say, none of this excuses Jedwabne or Iraq.
> At the time of Jedwabne Poland as nation state did not exist, the government was truly symbolic, on emigration. Before II WW there was barely 20 years of Polish government during which time there was much other problems (ever heard of Russia invading Poland after WW1?) There was in fact a lot of racism towards Jews in that time but no organized efforts or pogroms. This only came after the government was removed and replaced by Nazi occupation.
And I could come up with a bunch of excuses here for US behavior. BTW, claiming Poland was a "people" and not a "nation-state" is a complete cop-out for Poland's Holocaust atrocities.
> If you compare it to current US situation, if the government stopped working completely, I am sure as hell there would be civil war between white and black population.
No. Black US population is about 15%. It wouldn't be a civil war - it would be a massacre, which is why I and many others have been trying against all hope to calm down current tensions. I've worked in an "intersectional conflict zone" - I know what people can do to each other. It can absolutely happen in the US if we don't take care.
> one nation state abusing power is no excuse for another doing the same.
Yes, I totally agree.
BTW, I noticed you didn't address any of my other points.
In my opinion much more damning than the actions of a government - not necessarily explicitly supported by the population.
Heck, many US citizens don't seem to care that about the same number of people killed on 9/11 are dying every 2 days in the US from a virus that their leader continually downplays as he dithers about recommending quack "cures" that will somehow magically make up for his incompetence in handling said virus.
Edit: to be clear, I was not defending Trump. I've never supported him, although I'm not afflicted by this burning obsession with him so many have. I'd delete this comment if I could.
I was just confused about the fact that the user referred to "we" Americans a few comments ago, and now used the term "they". I thought it was some kind of trolling - someone taking on different personnages in different comments.
It honestly didn't occur to me that there would be a political reason for it, or I wouln't have bothered responding.
Not in America.
> US rallies for some causes where it seems to suit US interests.
Yes, we act in support of national interests, like every country.
> There are so many countries that need help but in recent years whether a country gets US presence seems largely dependent on whether there is oil there and US is all too happy to turn their face away if the government of the oil-rich country is collaborating with US.
America is not out to save the world and this is a good thing. There is nothing worse than some outsider coming in to save the poor savages from their own evil selves. It’s not our job to pass judgement on others or to fix every problem in the world, unless it is in the national interest (even then I’d say the US has too many interests but that’s another issue).
> This unfortunately adds fire to the trouble in the Middle East. If you are islamic radical it is extremely easy to recruit people by showing them factual, real, undeniable misbehavior of US.
This is laughable. Compare The US to the regimes in that area in terms of “misbehavior”. America has nothing to be ashamed of there.
Actually for the Western and Western-allied world this is wrong. 9/11 marked the begin of the dismantling of citizen rights in too many countries - from such relatively harmless things as stricter rules on flights and mandatory body searches to justifications for nation-scale espionage or, with the Brits, even allowing the government to lock people up for not revealing passwords.
Germany hasn't - we've had much worse terror attacks in the years before 9-11. I'll just mention the Oktoberfest attack or the attack on the munich olympic games. In terms of collective scare, the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) far eclipses any terror risk after 9-11. Even today, more people get killed by Nazi supporters than other terrorists.
We still have put a lot of restrictive measures in place, but it's more that 9-11 and terrorism act as a convenient leverage to impose those measures and not the actual danger.
Think the direct impact on allied countries who had to send troops to Afganistan. Think airtravel security (theatre). Think financial regulation. Darn.. think the following Middle East interventions by Western Allies. You could say that Syrian civil war today with millions of refugees had direct impact of 911 and subsequent western (and not so western) intervention in Middle East.
Are you aware that any major national event that has a large impact on one of the world's greatest powers will have fallout that affects the rest of the world?
I'd think after debacles like Iraq, that should be obvious.
I mean 9/11 did prompt NATO's article 5 to get invoked. 9/11, Article 5, & the ensuing war certainly changed the landscape for North America and Europe. Other world powers like China took notice as a result.
Don't forget the heightened fears around that time, which were stoked by the 2004 Madrid & 2005 London train bombings.
So although post 9/11 is often viewed as US centric, it undoubtedly affected much of Europe, and it's ripples were felt throughout much of the developed world. While many nations might not have 9/11 in the forefront of their minds, like Americans do, they probably have had their foreign/domestic policy influenced as a result of 9/11's side effects & view the threat of terrorism very differently to a pre 9/11 world.
The 9/11 world is very obvious in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria.
Non Natural "persons," corporations and other legal entities, can own each other. They can be part owned.
They can be owned, taxed and regulated in jurisdictions of their own choosing. Effectively, this allows groups (clumps of legal entities) to be structured such that tax liabilities, other liabilities, transparency requirements, and such are chosen a la carte. Transparency requirements of entity type A in jurisdiction X. Tax liabilities of entity type B in jurisdiction Y. etc.
There has never been a reform of this system. It just keeps growing in complexity. At this point considering these "loopholes" is hopelessly naive.
This kind of detailed & complex structure is very open to regulatory capture. Politicians, who tend to think in principles or ideals can't translate their opinions into legislative details effectively. Companies, who can, have a powerful position. Accountants and lawyers, who actually understand the implications of details, have a strong interest in the complexity itself.
The whole thing is premised on ideas like "company A is a commercial company" or "company A is an American company." Those just aren't true. Company A is a legal entity, that forms part of a commercial company. The "group" is the company. Company A is also not american or any other nationality. Part of the group may be subjects to parts of american laws. As a whole though...
Anti-terrorism is only the tip of the iceberg. Embargo avoidance. Tax avoidance. Liability avoidance. Labour law avoidance.
For a startup analogy, consider the cliche "You set the price, I'll set the terms." You can fund or buy a company at any nominal "price," but the terms define what that price means. EG. price X with a 10X preference term makes price irrelevant in many circumstances.
This is the game regulators and legislators are playing with corporation laws.
We need to be realistic about what the UN is, why it exists and what it can realistically do. Taxes are far outside the UN's scope. It's even outside the EU's scope (currently), and the EU has a lot more authority over members and economic issues generally.
In any case, it's not the rates that matter. It's corporation law, which determines what a company is for tax purposes. It's also corporation tax law, which is strategically byzantine. Individual countries (especially the US) can fix this, it's just hard.
For example, corporation law acknowledges Google's claim that "Google Ireland" is not related to "Alphabet" and that arbitrary amounts (many billions)paid by Alphabet to Google Ireland (ostensibly IP royalty payments) are ordinary business expenses. If US corporation law considered them one entity, they would owe the corporate tax rate.
Besides that... maybe corporate profit tax is just a bad solution. It has never really worked well. Historically such estate-like taxes have been a more solid approach. "Every grain flour owes its lord $n per year." In modern terms, you could say that Amazon owes x% (say 1%) of its market cap. In theory, this doesn't distinguish between profitable companies that can afford to pay from unprofitable ones that can't. In practice, (a)neither does the current system and (b)shares are money too.
For analogy, consider gambling taxes. You can try to charge the gambler on wins. Because of the nature of gambling, this needs to be netted against losses somehow. Meanwhile, requiring gamblers to keep records is a lost cause. The opportunities for tax evasion, the complexity of needed rules... it makes the whole thing unworkable.
Over time, various countries have moved to taxing casinos themselves with an excise-tax-like machine. Instead of gamblers paying on wins, casinos pay on wins. This is easy to manage, requires one paragraph of tax law and produces a predictable and steady stream of taxes.
Structure is what matters, not rates, not moral rhetoric. This is why politicians have such a hard time dealing with it.
I hold no illusions about the capacity of the UN to wield real power. But if UN member countries agree to this global minimum and sanction anyone who doesn't, it achieves the goal, no?
Tax havens are a classic example of Tragedy of the Commons. Since we don't actually have an institution with global powers that can effectively prevent such situations via global regulation, we need to do the next best thing – bully everyone into behaving better. Sure, sanctions hurt everyone in the short run, but in the long run it's worth it if we can stop spending a ludicrous amount of human capital on what is effectively dodging societal obligations at an unprecedented scale.
Not quite. At a very theoretical extreme, maybe... but it is (IMO) so theoretical that any efforts in that direction will yield nothing. IE, "going after tax havens" sounds good, but will do little. Multiple jurisdictions is not a solvable problem in practical terms. Even if it was solved, you would still need to deal with the main issues to get a good result.
The main issue is the way corporate law works. In reality, Alphabet owns all of it subsidiaries. It shouldn't really matter that one is in Ireland, and if you read the "abstract" of relevant legislation it sounds like it doesn't. In corporate (and corporate tax) law, they are treated in different ways for different purposes. That's why we don't get a (Profit)X(Tax Rate) result.
"Profit" is just as ethereal as "domicile."
In my opinion... I would abandon corporate income taxes entirely. Investors that buy Facebook or Amazon aren't in it for profits. Amazon reported about $11bn net income last year. Its market cap has increased by about $500bn... and $700bn so far this year. In theory these gains are taxed under CGT. In practice, CGT also runs into the swamp of corporation law.
This is like the problem with taxing gamblers. Stop trying to figure that out. Tax the casino instead. Tax either the market cap or the gains in market cap. Allow public companies to pay their taxes in shares.
..not saying any of this is simple... just saying that we can't win at whack-a-mole.
In my particular suggestion, it runs against the grain of tax policies. Tax policies (since the 70s) try to be "efficient," for a somewhat technical economic definition of the term. "Neutral" would be more descriptive. Taxing market cap makes bad investments worse. Even though profits are low, they are still taxed and ownership is diluted.
The reason that I think this is ok is because cash is what matters in reality, not profits.
...ultimately though... all this goes over the heads of 99% of politicians, and nearly anyone that doesn't have a vested interest.
They certainly aren't. The UN has already a few taxes agreement, including one on the line of setting international standards for corporate taxes.
The thing is that it only applies when corporate profits change country, and enforcement is bilateral.
(But why are we discussing the ship's property anyway?)
Fair response. It started from commenting on how corporate law shields and obscures ownership or interest from liability. In this case its liability for blowing up Beirut. The game is usually about tax liability, but it's a similar game.
My point is that when lawlessness in relation to tax occurs... it's usually enabled by corporation law, and the obscurity inherent in it. Something similar seems to have happened here, at least if this article is accurate.
the Russian man variously described as the owner or the operator of the Moldovan-flagged MV Rhosus, is said to have abandoned the vessel in Lebanon after declaring bankruptcy. The vessel’s deadly cargo had been purchased from the country of Georgia by a Mozambican firm that produces commercial explosives, via a British middleman trading firm linked to Ukraine.
The ownership of the Rhosus, and the companies that ordered the nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate to be transported halfway around the world in a rickety ship, are obscured by layers of secrecy
The spice must flow my friend, the spice must flow no matter what.
Your point of view seems to be very American centered.
But I dunno how is it possible to compare this with the long list of terror attacks Israel had between 1989-2008 or the emotional effect on the EU policies of the club terror attacks in Paris.
This is bad and this is bad, and all of these had a major effect on how the world looks nowadays. I wouldn't put the focus only on 9/11.
Why not talk about the 1770 Indian famine where millions died because of British policies.
I hope you got the point.
Under that arrangement, politicians and the very rich still get a way to retain their privacy and avoid taxes, which I assume they are very effective at lobbying for, but the risk of terrorism is minimised.
Panama, Liberia, Uzbekistan, etc. etc. have better things to care about than keeping accurate paper trails about corporate ownership to make life easy for tax auditors in air conditioned first world offices.
Unless you can somehow magically make them rich enough to solve all their big problems to the point where opaque chains of ownership seems worth caring about the symptom will persist.
"My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five, incorporated?"
"Uh." Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. "Hold on a moment." When the retinal patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and powers them up. "Just a second now." Browsers and menus ricochet through his sleep-laden eyes. "Can you repeat the company name?"
"Sure." Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as Manfred feels.
"Um." Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It's flashing for attention. There's a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn't propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. "I'm afraid I'm not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with non-executive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I've ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who's in charge if you want."
"Yes?" The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy's in New Jersey, it must be about three in the morning over there.
Malice – revenge for waking him up – sharpens Manfred's voice. "The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!" He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him.
...
One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies – and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day – has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful.
https://home.kpmg/us/en/home/insights/2020/01/tnf-eu-status-...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/LSU/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Basically each country must track the “beneficial owner” of all companies, i.e. the natural person(s) controlling it.
I’m sure there are more things to improve, but it’s the right direction.
The problem is, which ones?
By order of the judge, the cargo was brought ashore in 2014 and placed in Warehouse 12 at the port,[32] where it remained for the next six years.[16][17][23][33] The MV Rhosus sank in the harbour in February 2018.[34]
Customs officials had sent letters to judges requesting a resolution to the issue of the confiscated cargo, proposing that the ammonium nitrate be either exported, given to the army, or sold to the private Lebanese Explosives Company.[b][17] Letters had been sent on 27 June and 5 December 2014, 6 May 2015, 20 May and 13 October 2016, and 27 October 2017.[17][36] One of the letters sent in 2016 noted that judges had not replied to previous requests, and "pleaded":[17]
In view of the serious danger of keeping these goods in the hangar in unsuitable climatic conditions, we reaffirm our request to please request the marine agency to re-export these goods immediately to preserve the safety of the port and those working in it, or to look into agreeing to sell this amount ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion
So the customs office did their jobs.
You can do a lot with them and there are huge lacks in oversight
Try not to contribute to a Beirut
The cosmic horror and sci-fi stuff are window dressing to a plot that is mainly focused on the legal and illegal business, politics, privateering, exploitation, espionage and criminality that goes on in an international dockyard. It’s really really good with lots of story telling and the right amount of gaming challenges.
(I’ve not come across the term freeport before, but I am guessing this overlaps with what you meant.)
It's not really even that weird of a fiction. Everything is extremely based on reality, with a mere facade of "look we changed the names of everyday things! they are now strange!"
Very much disagree on that one.
SPOILER WARNING:
There are enough weird things in there, it's possible to miss them, but discovering really changes your whole outlook on the world. Things like: the Pale, the Insulindian Phasmid & the Mega Rich Light-Bending Guy in the shipping container.
Some skills are also kinda magical if you invest enough points, Interfacing & Inland Empire could be explained by your imagination, but it's hard to argue that Esprit De Corps (cutaway to what is happening to Precinct 41) & Shivers (Have conversations with the city of Revachol itself) aren't a bit supernatural.
The Phasmid and the Pale are fairly core to the world and story, though.
The concept of the Pale is utterly horrifying. It pretty much has no involvement with the game at all and I think that’s a brilliant thing.
The concept is there, lurking in the background of various plot lines, but it’s never actually part of a mission. You are left to your own imagination as to, at first, how seemingly horrific it is.
To later learn that the pale is expanding — at an unknown rate you are led to believe is like a rising tide — and will eventually destroy the world and no one really seems to care or talk about it as an issue that much puts all the other noir detective and soap opera plots and subplots in a fascinating light. The citizens of Revechol are a little insane, we get to guess a bit about why and can also deduce they are in denial.
Someone on gamepedia has pieced together this description from expository dialogue in the game:
What does the pale look like? It's acromatic, odourless, featureless. The pale is the enemy of matter and life. It is not like any other — or any thing in the world. It is the transition state of being into nothingness. Where matter borders the pale, the resulting border is an uproar of matter, rising into the pale. Rolling. Evaporating even, a great vision. The area of transition between the world and the pale is called porch collapse: A grey coronal mist, cold vapour, marked by spores of an opportunistic microorganism.
Pale is difficult to describe and measure, as it's something whose fundamental property is the suspension of properties: physical, epistemological, linguistic. The further into pale you travel, the steeper the degree of suspension. Right down to the mathematical — numbers stop working. No one has yet passed the number barrier since the discovery of the pale and it may be impossible.
In fact, one of the few measurable effects of the pale is that it is expanding at an unknown rate.
It's very cool in a fiction sense, but also mechanically in the game, you start as someone who has lost all their memories, which sets the character on the same knowledge level as the player, and you slowly uncover how the world works through playing. It's close enough to earth that things slowly begin to make sense, and you get lulled into a false sense of familiarity. Just as you think you have a handle on reality, the rug gets pulled away from underneath you and you fall into the Pale, a total break with anything familiar. It recontextualizes everything.
There is a line where either Joyce or Soona tells you about inter-isolary travel where she explains you that you need to aim your path through the Pale really carefully because it's possible to miss your destination and just continue sailing through the Pale forever. Which is supremely horrifying to me.
It is fundamentally less about a story and more about experiencing a world and a character in that world, and in that sense it's a very traditional RPG. One of the reasons that a world builder renames things is to give a clue to the player that things operate differently in a world then they are used to - and that is very true in Disco Elysium.
The physical world in Disco Elysium that we have access to is very small and it forces us to go over the same areas and same characters again and again - because it's not the physical world that changes but our knowledge of it and our ability to interact with it.
There are alot of financial games you can play with them
No matter what they were guilty of, it's the Lebanese government that confiscated 3000 tons of explosive material and stored it in conditions that lead to the explosion. It was their ammonium nitrate when it blew up and their responsibility.
All this "who owned that ship" stuff smells of finger pointing to hide the real guilty parties.
>There had been suggestions that it was meant for Beirut, to be used by Sunni militants or Hezbollah, and the final destination of Mozambique was a cover.
Aha. So? Good job confiscating it then. Lousy (or criminal) job not getting rid of it after.
Besides, did those "suggestions" only surface after the explosion by any chance?
It would be great if the solution they implement is to fix the broken bureaucracy and prevent the trafficking of high explosives.
People with normal reading comprehension would never conclude that quote means "no one should".
We should not let the government succeed in shifting blame or allow other "exciting headlines" distract from holding government responsible.
There had been suggestions that it was meant for Beirut, to be used by Sunni militants or Hezbollah, and the final destination of Mozambique was a cover.
Mix that with HA and the real ship owner doing business with the same Tanzanian bank.. the whole thing becomes stinky.
Guess they don't get posted to HN, although I'm sure I've seen one or two linked even here.
Blaming the company that owned the ship is does nothing but shift responsibility from those responsible for storing 2400 tons of explosives near a residential area. There will always be reasons why the government chooses to seize cargo, taking over 6 years to move dangerous cargo, and storing it in shoddy conditions, is on the government. Perhaps if this had happened shortly after seizing the cargo the company could be more accurately blamed.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/world/middleeast/beirut-e...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-beirut-explosion-sev...
- Grechushkin (Russian) was transporting ammonium nitrate from Georgia to Mozambique
- Grechushkin Ordered a last minute stop in Beirut to pick up additional cargo in the form of trucks, but the plan was abandoned when the first loaded truck almost broke the deck
- Lebanese officials then detained the ship for safety reasons
- Grechushkin declared bankruptcy and disappeared and the ship was impounded
- The ammonium nitrate was moved to a warehouse at the port and the ship eventually sank behind a breakwater, where its wreckage remains
- 4 years of complicated secrecy, corruption, shell companies, and “flags of convenience” involving Cypriot shipping magnate Manoli, the Portuguese illicit arms trafficking Vieira family, the Mozambique ruling elite, and Ukranian middle-man company Savaro, stymied solutions
- Lebanon then tried to offload the material to several organization including the Lebanese army and a local explosives manufacturer but they refused
- Lebanon then tried to return the cargo to Georgia but did not for unknown reasons
- On July 20, 2020, two weeks prior to the explosion, Lebanese security services warned the president that there were serious flaws with the storage of the ammonium nitrate
Then disaster.
So ironically, it seems that it was the attempt to secure the stuff that ultimately caused the disaster.
That said, I believe the article mentions the nitrates being removed during that time.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/dec/20/s...
So yeah, it might not be an explosive but being trapped on ships with a potential to be sick isn't exactly fun. Sadly a lot of this has to do with out of sight out of mind, these crews are not generally seen by people even though when out on a cruise you physically see them each day.
[0]https://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/tourism-cruises/ar...
> According to three European intelligence sources investigating the blast, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity, the amount still stored in the warehouse by August may have been smaller than the initial 2,750 tons. They said the size of the explosion was equivalent to as little as 700 to 1,000 tons of ammonium nitrate.
That means to me someone, somewhere is building bombs.
I'm not sure how accurate the explosion size estimate is, but I suppose, not so much. And there are several factors that might have dampened the explosion (proximity to ground, water, etc)
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bomb-tra...
https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/lng/faq.html#900
Yes, it needs an oxidizer. 5-15% LNG vapor to air is sufficient. Like in the case of a rail car being ruptured and leaking LNG.
a quick Wiki shows Agriculture in Lebanon is the third most productive sector in the country after the tertiary and industrial sectors. It contributes 3.6% to GDP and employs around 4% of the active working population.
Is it feasible for a subset of 216,000 people to steal this chemical rampantly over five years? absolutely. it never goes bad, and you can trade it with neighboring farmers almost like a barter system for things like seed, dung and tractor parts. Should you ever store it? absolutely not, but im willing to venture Lebanese farmers arent millionires and dont really care.
if just 300 people strated looting this chemical theyd only need 20 pounds a piece. theres 3000 tonnes right there.
TL;DR: i do not think this is being used to make explosives.
That's 3 tonnes... (And as the saying goes, what's the difference between 3 tonnes and 3000 tonnes? About 3000 tonnes.)
In a July 20, 2020, report to the president and prime minister — just two weeks prior to the explosion — Lebanese security services warned that there were serious security flaws at the facility that left the ammonium nitrate open to theft.
One door of the unguarded warehouse was missing, while there was also a hole in the southern wall, the report said.
Until the whole world is rich enough to not have to cut corners this kind of stuff (the shipping story, the chain of events leading to the explosion in downtown Beirut is exceptional which is why they're so pissed off about it) is normal.
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/05841913/filing-h...
Is that the sort of outfit that you would order nearly 3000 tons of stuff from? They were registered as dormant. The level of corruption all the way through this chain of events is quite something.
The same is true for both the US and UK (both places where I have founded companies.)
Please don't confuse security with obscurity.
This is an apt description of the international shipping industry as a whole. Flags of convenience, shells upon shells upon shells, where nobody knows who they work for, or who should be sued, fraudulent certification, all enabled by port authorities who are hesitant to seize incompliant ships.
What's your point? That terrorists use shitty explosives if they can't get the good stuff like Semtex?
Meanwhile, much larger amounts of ammonium nitrate are used as fertilizer. Makes me wonder why the Lebanese authorities didn't sell the stuff as fertilizer to get rid of it.
AH yes, the Hezbollah, just a militant group, not a bunch of terrorists.
I'd say it's a trend from the top leadership. Unfortunately, despite this fact, they are going to try to pin it on someone.
I want just the facts please.
It's only because the government wanted to steal/use/sell/recover $ this happened.
It's just common fertiliser. Used everywhere. Transported everywhere.
If they really didn't want it they could have dumped it at sea and got some carbon credits.
Rickety ship's are a story, but nothing to do with Beirut.
Then they would have done so instead of letting the cargo go bad.
But you'd need to say it rather than imply something Qanon style. What is going on?
My theory. It's a ricky ship transporting ammonium nitrate for use farming or mining. To differentiate you'd have to see if this counterfeit ammonium nitrate really does cost more to be mining grade or it's just in the name and is for farming.
How would illegal arms play out in an alternate theory?
"The ultimate customer for the ammonium nitrate on the ship, a Mozambican explosives factory, is part of a network of companies previously investigated for weapons trafficking and allegedly supplying explosives used by terrorists.The factory never tried to claim the abandoned material."