Tax haven in the context of "Bank secrecy"

Modified gross national income (also Modified GNI or GNI*) is a metric used by the Central Statistics Office (Ireland) to measure the Irish economy rather than GNI or GDP. GNI* is GNI minus the depreciation on Intellectual Property, depreciation on leased aircraft and the net factor income of redomiciled PLCs.

While "Inflated GDP-per-capita" due to base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tools is a feature of tax havens, Ireland was the first to adjust its GDP metrics. Economists, including Eurostat, noted Irish Modified GNI (GNI*) is still distorted by Irish BEPS tools and US multinational tax planning activities in Ireland (e.g. contract manufacturing); and that Irish BEPS tools distort aggregate EU-28 data, and the EU-US trade deficit.

Rainier III (Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand Grimaldi; 31 May 1923 – 6 April 2005) was Prince of Monaco from 1949 to his death in 2005. Rainier ruled the Principality of Monaco for almost 56 years.

Rainier was born at the Prince's Palace of Monaco, the only son of Hereditary Princess Charlotte and Prince Pierre. During his reign, he was responsible for the transformation of Monaco's economy, shifting from its traditional casino gambling base to its current status as a tax haven and cultural destination. The Prince also coordinated the substantial reforms of Monaco's constitution, which limited the powers of sovereign rule.

Ireland has been labelled as a corporate tax haven in multiple financial reports, an allegation which the state has rejected in response. Ireland is on all academic tax haven lists, including the § Leaders in tax haven research, and tax NGOs. Ireland does not meet the 1998 OECD definition of a tax haven, but no OECD member, including Switzerland, ever met this definition; only Trinidad & Tobago met it in 2017. Similarly, no EU–28 country is amongst the 64 listed in the 2017 EU tax haven blacklist and greylist. In September 2016, Brazil became the first G20 country to "blacklist" Ireland as a tax haven.

Ireland's base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tools give some foreign corporates § Effective tax rates of 0% to 2.5% on global profits re-routed to Ireland via their tax treaty network. Ireland's aggregate § Effective tax rates for foreign corporates is 2.2–4.5%. Ireland's BEPS tools are the world's largest BEPS flows, exceed the entire Caribbean system, and artificially inflate the US–EU trade deficit. Ireland's tax-free QIAIF & L–QIAIF regimes, and Section 110 SPVs, enable foreign investors to avoid Irish taxes on Irish assets, and can be combined with Irish BEPS tools to create confidential routes out of the Irish corporate tax system. As these structures are OECD–whitelisted, Ireland's laws and regulations allow the use of data protection and data privacy provisions, and opt-outs from filing of public accounts, to obscure their effects. There is arguable evidence that Ireland acts as a § Captured state, fostering tax strategies.

Banking in Switzerland dates to the early 18th century through Switzerland's merchant trade and over the centuries has grown into a complex and regulated international industry. Banking is seen as very emblematic of Switzerlandand the country has been one of the largest, if not largest, offshore financial centers and tax havens in the world since the mid-20th century, with a long history of banking secrecy, security and client confidentiality reaching back to the early 1700s. Starting as a way to protect wealthy European banking interests, Swiss banking secrecy was codified in 1934 with the passage of a landmark federal law, the Federal Act on Banks and Savings Banks. These laws were used to protect assets of persons being persecuted by Nazi authorities but have also been used by people and institutions seeking to illegally evade taxes, hide assets, or to commit other financial crime.

Controversial protection of foreign accounts and assets during World War II sparked a series of proposed financial regulations seeking to limit bank secrecy, but with little resulting action. Despite various international efforts to roll back banking secrecy laws in the country which were largely minimized or reverted by Swiss social and political forces, in 2017 Switzerland agreed to "automatic exchange of information" (AEOI) with foreign governments and their revenue services regarding information of depositors not resident in Switzerland. This constituted de facto the end of Swiss banking secrecy for depositors who were not Swiss residents. Furthermore, after Switzerland ratified the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act agreement with the United States, because of concerns regarding their tax liability (the U.S. taxes its citizens regardless of whether they are resident in the U.S. or not) some Swiss banks have gone so far as to close accounts held by US citizens, and to ban the opening of new accounts by US citizens and by dual US-Swiss citizens, including those deemed lawful permanent Swiss residents. Thus banking secrecy remains in force only for those residing in and solely taxable in Switzerland.

Jurisdictional arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of discrepancies between competing legal jurisdictions. It takes its name from arbitrage, the practice in finance of purchasing a good at a lower price in one market and selling it at a higher price in another. Just as in financial arbitrage, the attractiveness of jurisdiction arbitrage depends largely on its transaction costs, here the costs of switching legal service providers from one government to another.

The lower the exit costs for leaving the jurisdiction (unrestricted emigration, cheap travel, liquidity of assets) the more desirable and feasible it is. Conversely, high entry costs into the more favourable jurisdiction are an inhibitor on jurisdictional arbitrage; certain tax havens such as Andorra grant permanent residency rights to immigrants only if they meet certain criteria. Jurisdictional arbitrage is a significant concept in modern free market anarcho-capitalism.

The 2012–2013 Cypriot financial crisis was an economic crisis in the Republic of Cyprus that involved the exposure of Cypriot banks to overleveraged local property companies, the Greek government-debt crisis, the downgrading of the Cypriot government's bond credit rating to junk status by international credit rating agencies, the consequential inability to refund its state expenses from the international markets and the reluctance of the government to restructure the troubled Cypriot financial sector.

On 25 March 2013, a €10 billion international bailout by the Eurogroup, European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB), and International Monetary Fund (IMF) was announced, in return for Cyprus agreeing to close the country's second-largest bank, the Cyprus Popular Bank (also known as Laiki Bank), imposing a one-time bank deposit levy on all uninsured deposits there, and seizing possibly around 48% of uninsured deposits in the Bank of Cyprus (the island's largest commercial bank). A minority proportion of it was held by citizens of other countries (many of them from Russia), who preferred Cypriot banks because of their higher interest on bank account deposits, relatively low corporate tax, and easier access to the rest of the European banking sector. This resulted in numerous insinuations by US and European media who presented Cyprus as a "tax haven" and suggested that the prospective bailout loans were meant for saving the accounts of Russian depositors. No insured deposit of €100,000 or less would be affected, though 47.5% of all bank deposits above €100,000 were seized.

Ireland's Corporate Tax System is a central component of Ireland's economy. In 2016–17, foreign firms paid 80% of Irish corporate tax, employed 25% of the Irish labour force (paid 50% of Irish salary tax), and created 57% of Irish OECD non-farm value-add. As of 2017, 25 of the top 50 Irish firms were U.S.–controlled businesses, representing 70% of the revenue of the top 50 Irish firms. By 2018, Ireland had received the most U.S. § Corporate tax inversions in history, and Apple was over one–fifth of Irish GDP. Academics rank Ireland as the largest tax haven; larger than the Caribbean tax haven system.

Ireland's "headline" corporation tax rate is 12.5%, however, foreign multinationals pay an aggregate § Effective tax rate (ETR) of 2.2–4.5% on global profits "shifted" to Ireland, via Ireland's global network of bilateral tax treaties. These lower effective tax rates are achieved by a complex set of Irish base erosion and profit shifting ("BEPS") tools which handle the largest BEPS flows in the world (e.g. the Double Irish as used by Google and Facebook, the Single Malt as used by Microsoft and Allergan, and Capital Allowances for Intangible Assets as used by Accenture, and by Apple post Q1 2015).

Conduit OFC and sink OFC is an empirical quantitative method of classifying corporate tax havens, offshore financial centres (OFCs) and tax havens.

Traditional methods for identifying tax havens analyse tax and legal structures for base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tools. However, this approach follows a purely quantitative approach, ignoring any taxation or legal concepts, to instead follow a big data analysis of the ownership chains of 98 million global companies. The technique gives both a method of classification and a method of understanding the relative scale – but not absolute scale – of havens/OFCs.