Nevis: A Tax Haven Preventing Positive Globalization?

The Island of Nevis is the most secretive tax haven in the world. Nevis is a solitary volcano in the Caribbean, with a population of just 11, 000, notorious for its involvement in Britain’s biggest ever tax fraud, as well as having been implicated in many other sordid financial scams of modern times, such as when 620, 000 Americans were fleeced out of $220 million in a pay-day loan scam.

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Despite its tiny population, Nevis is also home to six domestic banks, one international bank, 18 insurance managers, and dozens of registered law firms. In fact Nevis might well have the highest lawyer to person* ratio on earth.

Nevis is becoming increasingly popular with the world’s rich: since 2012 its financial services sector has grown by a quarter.

Nevis specializes in letting its clients create and register corporations with greater anonymity than almost any other place on planet earth:  even the island’s own corporate land registry doesn’t know who owns the corporations registered there.

Companies benefit from further protections: if you suspect a company of having acquired some of its assets illegally, you have to file $100 000 bond with the courts in Nevis before initiating legal proceedings, in order to make sure that no-one makes frivolous claims.

Not that you would have much luck filing a claim against a company registered on the island: Nevis’ regulator holds no information on who owns the companies registered there, or on who owns its companies’ assets.

Then there’s the fact that anyone disclosing financial information without a court order is liable for a $10 000 fine and up to a year in prison. This would serve to put of investigative journalists.

All of this poses a problem for authorities wishing to tackle global crime: if Nevis continues to guarantee anonymity over ownership of assets then there is no way for global crime fighting agencies to trace whether or not those assets have been acquired illegally.

A further problem is that it makes it more difficult for nation states to track down whether large corporations or individuals are dodging their taxes.

Relevance of this case study to A-level sociology 

The existence of tax havens demonstrates the absence of global social norms pertaining to tax, and to the relative powerlessness of Nation States to control flows of global capital.

It also suggests support for the Marxist/ World Systems Theory view of globalization. The existence of Tax Havens allows the richest to keep their wealth, perpetuating global inequality. They certainly don’t benefit the global poor!

*some research suggests that ‘lawyer’ and ‘person’ are mutually exclusive categories. Although there’s no actual evidence to back this up.

Sources: The Week July 2018.

This post will also be published to the steem blockchain. 

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