Obtaining an anonymous shell company is easier in the U.S. than in the rest of the world”

[Up2Late]

Last edited Fri Nov 16, 2012, 05:07 AM - Edit history (1)

This is shocking, but not really that surprising.

Study: “Obtaining an anonymous shell company is easier in the U.S. than in the rest of the world”

http://www.classwarfareexists.com/study-obtaining-an-anonymous-shell-company-is-easier-in-the-u-s-than-in-the-rest-of-the-world/#ixzz2CN7UXWON

Just remember when you read this – Congress could stop this overnight. It’s a huge deal and is at the core of how the 1% and corporations evade taxes and how criminal and terrorist organizations are funded. The notion that a person can’t open a bank account without showing a picture ID but a criminals and the wealthy would on average have to attempt 4 times to find a company to incorporate a business anonymously without any documentation whatsoever is ASTOUNDING.

This study was conducted by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, Brigham Young University and Griffith University in Australia. Researchers pretended to be 21 different fictitious consultants sending 7,400 email solicitations to 3,700 Corporate Service Providers in 182 countries attempting to set up an anonymous shell corporation. The purpose of this study was to identify how difficult it would be to set up a corporation anonymously so there is no paper trail of whom the real owners are; anonymous, untraceable shell companies are used for money laundering, financing terrorist activities, crime organizations, embezzlers and tax cheats etc. Or as they explain in the study:

The defining metaphor is of shell companies functioning as a “corporate veil”: screening and separating criminals from illicit financial activities. Thus the crux of the issue is whether authorities can “look through” the corporate veil to find the individuals pulling the strings (referred to as the “beneficial owner”).

In all of these email interactions – they requested to set up a corporation without having to provide any form of identification with these Corporate Service Providers. The United States rated worse than every country in the world except for Kenya. The third worst: Canada.



Read more: http://www.classwarfareexists.com/study-obtaining-an-anonymous-shell-company-is-easier-in-the-u-s-than-in-the-rest-of-the-world/#ixzz2CN7UXWON
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[Selatius]

1. I have a hunch it was done by design. You couldn't sack the Middle Class without such vast loopholes

So what if you packaged several thousand unstable securities and sold them as if they were good investments?

Somebody else owns those instruments now, and you also made money on the other end by betting those securities would fail. Also, nobody could specifically prove you did it with the intent to defraud investors. There's a lack of evidence.

This could be done on a large scale if you set up shell corporations in an attempt to hide the shoddy standards you employed in creating the loans in the first place. An investigator could say there were some very poor standards used in offering people loans, but you would have a hard time finding the dude who came up with the whole scheme in the first place except to note that there's a whole bunch of securities on the balance sheets that can't be valued. If you could actually tie evidence to specific people, then you have a chance to send them to prison. With shell corporations, it can make that task very difficult because you don't even know who runs them or who even created them.

In some cases, homeowners with enough cash and a stalwart attorney were able to successfully fight off a foreclosure because the chain of evidence that MERS is supposed to hold with respect to which bank sold which mortgages to whichever other bank or holding company was broken, so the bank trying to foreclose couldn't exactly provide all the documents necessary to demonstrate that, yes, it does now control the mortgage that some other bank originated, but most homeowners would be so lucky to have the kind of cash for a high-powered attorney.

[Up2Late]

2. Yup, I think they call it plausible deniability or something similar

So yeah, the "pro-business" people in congress did this on purpose to help out their "supporters."

[kelliekat44]

3. I heard about this in depth on an WAMU program in DC. It is astounding and even more

incredible that our government has not put an end to this crap long ago.

[Poll_Blind]

4. Read big chunks of the source...hella interesting. nt

PB

[Up2Late]

5. kick

[hootinholler]

6. Kick for later. n/t