October 2004 Archives

MIAMI, Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Jonathan Curshen is a consultant in the area of international asset protection. He is a member of ITPA (International Tax Planners Association) and APOI (Asia Pacific Offshore Institute). He specializes in offshore asset management, global investing, worldwide banking, and investment strategy and counseling. It is his business to know what companies need to know in order to utilize the valuable tool of offshore asset management and protection.

"When it comes to international accounting practices, holding companies, investment counselors... it all comes down to this: Trust. International investing is no place to guess about the safety of your money and the security of your investments," states Jonathan Curshen.

A Chinese crackdown on money-laundering has uncovered 330 possible cases involving more than US$1 billion (euro 790 million), the government said Thursday.

The cases, found from January to June, have been handed over to prosecutors, state television reported, citing the government's foreign exchange regulator.

In one case, regulators were alerted by a surge of foreign exchange transactions totaling US$17 million (euro 13.5 million) through one bank, the report said. It said the money was tracked to a casino boss in the Chinese territory of Macau who collected the money from mainland gamblers.

By Jenne Mannion -

UK investors could soon have access to hundreds more funds as a result of important changes to two sets of rules, one governing offshore funds and the other the structure and operation of investment portfolios.

Tony Stenning, the director of products and client strategies at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, describes them as "the most significant and important changes we have seen to the funds landscape in two decades".

Barclaycard’s recent $293 million (€240 million) acquisition of Juniper Financial from Canadian bank CIBC may not be the leap the credit card unit of the UK’s sixth-largest bank had planned, but does provide a long-sought after point of entry into the $700 billion US credit card industry.

With 700,000 credit card accounts and $1.4 billion in receivables, Juniper is some way off Providian Financial, the seventh-largest US credit card issuer that Barclaycard unsuccessfully courted earlier this year. However it is one of North America’s fastest growing issuers, establishing its market position in just four years. Although a full service credit card issuer, Juniper specialises in co-branded and affinity cards for companies and not-for-profit organisations and has partnerships with Gulf Petroleum, Best Western Hotel Group and Midwest Airlines.

Determined to lessen their reliance on the often-controversial offshore private banking market, UBS and Credit Suisse (CS) continue to invest heavily in onshore private banking in Europe.

These onshore operations are posting cost:income ratios of well over 200 percent - meaning that they are significantly loss-making.

Such is the fervour with which the two big Swiss banks treat onshore Europe, that UBS may continue to lose money in this segment up to 2010. CS may do a little better, turning its onshore Europe operation around by 2006, new research made available to PBI suggests.

MIAMI, Oct. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Jonathan Curshen, a consultant in the area
of international asset protection and member of ITPA (International Tax
Planners Association) and APOI (Asia Pacific Offshore Institute), urges
businesses to consider Belize for their offshore operations. Mr. Curshen
specializes in offshore asset management, global investing, worldwide banking,
and investment strategy and counseling. "Belize is a great choice for an
international business corporation location," he says. It is his business to
be informed of what companies need to know in order to utilize the valuable
tool of offshore asset management and protection.

By Dwight Bellanfante -

Government senator Noel Sloley has called on the Patterson administration to set up Jamaica as an offshore financial centre and tax haven - an idea that JLP leadership aspirant Bruce Golding says that he is already studying.

"I have asked a team to examine a specific set of proposals including the risks of things like offshore universities, offshore recuperative facilities and financial centres including the resources required to establish them," Golding told the Observer yesterday.

Christopher Rodrigues, chief executive of Visa International, brandished a cell phone to make his point about global expansion during a conference in London last month organized by the Economist and the Wharton/INSEAD Alliance. This, he said, was the unlikely means by which companies like Visa will penetrate new markets, particularly in developing nations. Not that Visa has designs on becoming the next Nokia or DoCoMo. The cell phone, he explained, will allow monetary transactions in even the remotest of locations, where land-lines have not yet been constructed.

By Sam Dealey -

Although Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry often rails on the campaign trail against U.S. companies that relocate jobs abroad, seeking lower tax and wage rates, federal records show that the Massachusetts senator is heavily invested in such companies and has recently received substantial support from some of their top executives.

Campaign finance reports reviewed by The Hill reveal that employees at 25 companies identified by CNN’s Lou Dobbs as “either sending American jobs overseas, or choosing to employ cheap overseas labor, instead of American workers,” have contributed more than $370,000 to Kerry’s presidential campaign.

By Simon Gray -

Officials and financial industry practitioners in Jersey and Guernsey are mostly too polite to point it out, but in any comparison between offshore financial centres they possess a certain climatic advantage – not that it might seem particularly evident on a wet and gloomy winter’s day off the Normandy coast.

However, when Hurricane Ivan devastated the Cayman Islands in early September, law firms and consultants were among the international businesses that chose to relocate staff temporarily to the Channel Islands, among other locations. The two islands are already carving out a promising business in the provision of disaster recovery facilities.

By Nick Allen -

THREE British bankers accused of a multi-million-pound fraud involving officials of the failed oil company Enron said yesterday they would appeal a judge’s ruling that they should be extradited to stand trial in the United States.

They claimed the decision was a violation of their "rights as Englishmen" to be tried by a jury of their peers and accused the US government of exploiting new extradition legislation intended to deal with terrorist suspects.

By Sebastian Tong -

SINGAPORE, Oct 14 (Reuters) - Singapore state investment fund Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd. is expected to buy stakes in a Chinese bank and Indonesia's largest listed oil group as it shakes up its $54 billion portfolio to reduce exposure to its home market.

Temasek [TEM.UL], which announced this week it intends to trim its assets in Singapore to one-third of the total in the next decade, said on Thursday it was the preferred bidder for 38.4 percent of Indonesian petroleum producer Medco.

By Bruce Schneier -

PARIS Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the Bush administration - specifically, the Department of Homeland Security - has wanted the world to agree on a standard for machine-readable passports. Countries whose citizens currently do not have visa requirements to enter the United States will have to issue passports that conform to the standard or risk losing their nonvisa status.

These future passports, currently being tested, will include an embedded computer chip. This chip will allow the passport to contain much more information than a simple machine-readable character font, and will allow passport officials to quickly and easily read that information. That is a reasonable requirement and a good idea for bringing passport technology into the 21st century.

BEIJING (Dow Jones)--China has streamlined the approval process for local companies planning to invest overseas in a move that further opens the door for cash-rich enterprises to expand their international presence.

While China is the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment, the amount of investment by Chinese companies abroad remains comparatively small.

The new regulations posted this week on the Ministry of Commerce Web site dramatically reduce the approval procedures for local firms looking to invest overseas.

By William L. Watts -

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- Congress sent President Bush Monday a major corporate tax overhaul that provides $136 billion in new or reconfigured tax breaks and other benefits. With that much at stake, there were bound to be some winners and losers.

Among the provisions that could have the biggest impact on investors, the bill gives companies a one-year window to repatriate foreign earnings, which are usually taxed at a corporate rate as high as 35 percent, at a one-time rate of 5.25 percent.

The controversial provision, which was initially opposed by the Bush administration, is a boon for U.S.-based multinationals.

ALEXANDRIA -- Part of tonight’s Presidential candidate debate, and Wednesday’s debate on domestic policy, is likely to focus on U.S. jobs and competition from abroad - - a topic tackled in a study on the "offshoring" phenomenon recently released by the 350,000-member National Taxpayers Union (NTU). [The study, There They Go Again: The Truth About Exporting Jobs is available online at the NTU website.]

"Periods of lackluster economic and employment growth tend to produce convenient bogeymen for office seekers to blame, and offshoring is their choice to explain the latest slump," said NTU Economic Policy Analyst and study author Tad DeHaven. "Blaming offshoring for today’s weaker-than-expected jobs report is a knee- jerk reaction that ignores other more likely factors such as the decline in the world economy, higher rates of domestic labor productivity, and the bursting of the technology bubble."

The government of Belize has announced plans to establish a new organisation that will be dedicated to facilitating the country’s participation in the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME).

A statement released after a Cabinet meeting last week revealed that the administration of Prime Minister Said Musa had agreed to introduce legislation that will create a new body to be know as the National Accreditation Council of Belize.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a fact sheet from Kerry-Edwards 2004 on John Kerry's plan to crack down on tax breaks that encourage corporations to outsource jobs and shelter profits overseas:

In recent weeks, new studies by independent tax experts have shown that U.S. corporations are using tax breaks to shift jobs and profits out of the United States at record rates, leaving middle-class taxpayers to foot the bill. George Bush (news - web sites) has consistently defended these special tax breaks for corporations and pushed for even more tax giveaways to help the country's largest multinationals export jobs and shelter profits overseas. John Kerry has a plan to end incentives that encourage outsourcing and collect the taxes that American corporations owe.

By Soman Baby -

MANAMA: One of India's fastest growing banks, ICICI Bank Limited, is to officially launch its offshore banking unit in Bahrain on Sunday.

Bahrain Monetary Agency (BMA) Governor Shaikh Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa will open the bank's branch at the Manama Centre, in the presence of ICICI managing director and chief executive officer K V Kamath.

By Jason Gorringe -

Both Malta and Switzerland have taken issue with a September 21 report in the UK's Guardian newspaper entitled 'Havens that have become a tax on the world's poor', which suggested that the world's offshore jurisdictions are "locked in a desperate competition" to attract tax evaders from onshore countries.

Responding to the report, which was spurred by the Tax Justice Network's launch of an international secretariat in London, chairman of the Malta Financial Services Authority, Professor JV Bannister observed that:

WASHINGTON, Oct 1 (Reuters) - U.S. financial regulators and an arm of the Treasury Department said on Friday they had signed an agreement to increase information-sharing in an effort to tighten up on bank violations of anti-money laundering laws.

"This marks another step in strengthening Bank Secrecy Act compliance and protecting the U.S. financial system from corruption by terrorists and other criminals," said Stuart Levey, Treasury's under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.