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Bank Hapoalim (Switzerland) Pleads Guilty and Bank Hapoalim B.M. Enters into Deferred Prosecution Agreement for Criminal Misconduct; Agree to Pay Nearly $875 Million Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, Richard E. Zuckerman, the Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Tax Division, and Don Fort, the Chief of the Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigation (“IRS-CI”), announced today the guilty plea of Bank Hapoalim (Switzerland) Ltd. and entry of criminal charges against Bank Hapoalim B.M. for conspiring with U.S. taxpayers...

What kind of civil rights nonprofit has millions of dollars in offshore accounts? According to recent reports, the scandal-plagued Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) does, and that’s just scratching the surface of its problems. The SPLC recently published its updated “hate map” plotting “hate groups” across America, right as Americans are fearing for their lives and livelihoods in a deadly pandemic. That map inflated the numbers not only by listing “hate groups” that barely exist but by defaming mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups” on par with the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, former SPLC employee Bob Moser...

By bizarrely going after Sam Harris, Majid Nawaaz, and others, the once venerable organization has abandoned its core mission, focusing instead on dirty partisan politics Shortly after the election of Donald Trump in November of 2016, a lot of people I knew wrote biggish checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center. They weren’t alone: According to tax filings, the group took in $136 million last year alone, bringing its total assets to a whopping half-a-billion dollars.This surge in the organization’s popularity makes sense: The SPLC, after all, is the group that had once, nearly four decades ago, protected Vietnamese shrimpers...

Sen. Orrin Hatch had to remind Democrats they were being enormously hypocritical when attacking Secretary of the Treasury nominee Steven Mnuchin. Various senators on the Senate Committee on Finance, including Sen. Robert Menendez, pressed Mnuchin on offshore Cayman Island accounts. “One does not go and create offshore entities at the end of the day other than to avoid, in some form or fashion, the tax laws of the United States. That’s pretty simple,” Menendez said. “What you did may have been legal, but it certainly was to help people and entities avoid taxes.” After a contentious sparring match, Hatch jogged...

Questions are being asked about why Americans don’t seem very prominent among those exposed in the massive Panama Papers leak.  And dark suspicions exist that the leaker is Soros-funded and has deliberately shielded certain parties, in an effort aimed at discrediting Russia in particular.  As “Tyler Durden” of Zerohedge noted: ... in an interview conducted between Wired magazine and the director of the organization that released the Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ, Gerard Ryle…said: Ryle says that the media organizations have no plans to release the full dataset, WikiLeaks-style, which he argues would expose...

Senator Markey has announced his support for the Iran deal that will let the terrorist regime inspect its own Parchin nuclear weapons research site, conduct uranium enrichment, build advanced centrifuges, buy ballistic missiles, fund terrorism and have a near zero breakout time to a nuclear bomb. There was no surprise there.

<p>If you're an American, July 4 likely holds some significance for you, even if that's only getting the day off from work, having a beer, and watching some fireworks. But if you're an American living overseas, July 1 may come to hold an even greater significance — the day the Internal Revenue Service's new overseas tax-collection rules took effect.</p>

Mitt Romney seems to have reflexively winced with embarrassment at the questions about his perfectly logical finance and tax decisions. Understandable. Of course, the subject of his wealth precedes not-so-veiled attacks coming from an unfriendly press corps and a vicious opponent who will use any means to paint him as a real-life Gordon Gekko. But he is missing a fantastic opportunity. "Yes, I have many offshore accounts. Yes, I take advantage of legal deductions and tax incentives in compliance with the tax code. I am a wealthy, successful man who didn't get that way by being a fool. Furthermore, one...

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has up to this point opted not to make his tax returns public. Not surprisingly, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift smells a rat and expressed her conspiratorial opinion during the predictions segment of PBS's McLaughlin Group Friday (video follows with transcript): ELEANOR CLIFT, NEWSWEEK: Romney’s refusal so far to release his income tax returns will be linked to probable investments in the Cayman Islands and the likelihood that he paid a very small percentage of his income in taxes.

You and I live in a totally different world than the ultra-rich and the international banking elite do. Many of them live in a world where they simply do not pay income taxes. Today, it is estimated that a third of all the wealth in the world is held in offshore banks. So why is so much of the wealth of the globe located in places such as Monaco, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the Isle of Man? It isn't because those are fun places to visit. It is to avoid taxes. The super wealthy and the international...

Investigators believe Madoff stuffed hundreds of millions of dollars in Ponzi profits into offshore tax havens.....forensic accountants are scouring Madoff's books as federal officials ready an indictment against the hedge-funder, who remains under house arrest. Accountants believe Madoff regularly sent bundles of money to Caribbean and Europe offshore accounts. He has been ordered to provide the SEC a detailed list of his assets - including investments, loans, lines of credit, business interests and brokerage accounts.

<p>Grand Cayman -- Some of you reading this maybe thinking, "Ah Cayman, isn't that the place with all the illegal financial activity?"</p> <p>It is true Cayman is the world's largest offshore financial center, and the world's fifth-biggest financial center, even though it is in the middle of the Caribbean on a small, pleasant island with only 40,000 people.</p>

WASHINGTON – The Department of Justice asked a federal court in Miami on Thursday to let the Internal Revenue Service serve a "John Doe" summons on MasterCard International. A "John Doe" summons would enable the IRS to obtain information about people whose identities are not known, the department said. The information obtained in the summons would help in identifying people who use offshore accounts to evade their U.S. tax liabilities, according to the department. In October 2000, a federal judge in Miami approved a similar "John Doe" summons on MasterCard International for 1998 and 1999. That summons targeted the records...