Finance – Page 2 – Abnormal Capitalist

The Inside Story of Apple’s $14 Billion Tax Bill

The Maxforce concluded that Ireland allowed Apple to create stateless entities that effectively let it decide how much — or how little — tax it pays. The investigators say the company channeled profits from dozens of countries through two Ireland-based units. In a system at least tacitly endorsed by Irish authorities, earnings were split, with the vast majority attributed to a “head office” with no employees and no specific home base — and therefore liable to no tax on any profits from sales outside Ireland. The U.S., meanwhile, didn’t tax the units because they’re incorporated in Ireland.

Interesting detail about the secrecy surrounding the process of collecting such documents :

Three weeks after the Senate hearing, Lienemeyer’s team asked Ireland for details of Apple’s tax situation. The Irish tax authorities soon dispatched a representative carrying a briefcase filled with a bundle of bound pages. The Irish could have simply sent the material via e-mail, but they were cautious about sharing taxpayer’s information with the EU and have a ground rule to avoid leaks: never send such documents electronically.

→ Bloomberg

How to Hide $400 Million

This didn’t just threaten Oesterlund’s fortune. It also had the potential to carve open a portal into the world of offshore finance, a place that the global elite has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build and defend. In the offshore archipelago, their interests are hidden behind shell companies and trusts, their anonymity guaranteed under the law, from Delaware to the Bahamas to the South Pacific. James S. Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey, calls the offshore financial world the “economic equivalent of an astrophysical black hole,” holding at least $21 trillion of the world’s financial wealth, more than the gross domestic product of the United States.

→ The New York Times Magazine

Deutsche Bank’s $10-Billion Scandal

160829_r28563-1199x1200-1471540574 — Illustration by Anna Parini

On an April evening in Moscow, I met with a broker who had intimate knowledge of the structure of the mirror trades. The city was emerging from the choking cold of winter, and young people flirted outside Paveletskaya Station as if it were high summer. As the broker and I walked across the square, he characterized mirror trades as just one of a thousand ruses employed by smart businessmen. But why, I asked him, would somebody with a prominent position at a major bank get involved in such a scheme? Wiswell’s annual compensation was in the region of a million and a half dollars. The broker laughed. He said that Wiswell had been paid handsomely by clients of the mirror trades. For the architects of the scheme, the broker explained, it was worth it to bribe someone inside the bank: “Guys always pay something. They think it will hook you, so you are not going to do unexpected things.” In the estimation of the broker, Wiswell was a useful functionary but hardly a criminal genius. Sometimes, the broker said, money was transferred into an offshore account maintained by Wiswell’s wife, and sometimes cash was delivered to Wiswell in a bag.

→ The New Yorker

What Tech’s Unicorn Cult Can Learn from the Art World

The art world knows about prices floating ever higher on abstraction and hope. The resonances aren’t completely coincidental. Both venture capitalists and art buyers are in the business of valuing the invaluable. Both stake their reputations on exquisite selection. Both nurture talent before it can support itself. Both have a soft spot for youth, for unbowed ego, for the myth of solitary genius, for the next new thing. Both operate in a world of frustratingly limited information and maddeningly unpredictable success. Both depend on consumer culture while holding themselves superior to it. And both the art market and venture investing have become increasingly winner-take-all games, with more clout to the companies and artists backed by the most powerful dealers or venture capitalists.

Credit : Harold Cunningham

→ The New Yorker

The Man Who Terrifies Wall Street

Bharara argues that publicizing criminal behavior is a public duty, for the purpose of deterrence. “It’s not my job to put out a ten-point program to fix corruption in New York State,” Bharara told me. “Prosecutors alone are not going to solve the problems. But we do want the problems to be solved. I can say that when you have an overabundance of outside income for legislators, when you have an overconcentration of power in the hands of a few people, and when you have a lack of transparency about how decisions are made and who makes them—that it is our job to point that out. We can give these issues a sense of urgency. A lot of people wake up to the possibility of better government when you start putting people in prison.”

→ The New Yorker