Big bank accounts apparently held by kleptocratic penguins
PENGUINS AGAIN
In last week’s newsletter I talked about the surprisingly large investments in U.K. property by people apparently resident in Antarctica, and suggested it was probably a statistical anomaly: perhaps people had clicked on the wrong line of a drop-down menu? But as often seems to happen when these rocks get turned over, the creepy-crawlies are more interesting than anticipated.
Thanks to Andres Knobel, lead researcher on beneficial ownership at the Tax Justice Network, for pointing out that this has happened before. To misquote Oscar Wilde: to assign improbable quantities of wealth to icy wastelands inhabited primarily by penguins once may be regarded as a misfortune; to do it twice looks like carelessness.
After the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-8, most of the world’s richest countries adopted the Common Reporting Standard and agreed to share information about money held in each others’ bank accounts to prevent tax dodging (America is an exception. It just demands information from other countries, without sharing it back, which helps explain South Dakota’s booming trust industry). Australia takes transparency that bit further and does not only receive information about how much wealth foreign residents hold in its banks, it also publishes it. And that brings us back to penguins.
In the 2019 data, some 2.5 million Australian dollars were apparently held in 12 accounts owned by tax residents of Bouvet, a storm-lashed uninhabited sub-Antarctic volcano, which belongs to Norway (Britain once also had a rival claim to it, though why anyone would want it is something of a mystery) and holds the rare distinction of being the most remote island in the world.