Naming and shaming

(Published in Westmeath Examiner on 28.6.2003

Naming and shaming
-- By John Kelly

The name and shame programme instituted to expose private citizens to public scorn for tax evasion is inherently selective.

Omitted from the McCarthy like lists published in Draconian fashion by the Irish Revenue Commissioners are the names of many amongst the ranks of the ultra rich for whom tax loopholes tax havens and off shore facilities have been especially established.

The Sunday Times June 18th 2000 ran a story related to the investigation of off shore accounts .

Depositories for vast sums of money.

Incidentally no one was charged as a result of the investigations into this wealth often obtained through fraud.

One example only ..
“Billions of pounds looted from state funds in Croatia by the former president , Franjo Tudjman, and his cronies were laundered through banks in London and off shore accounts in the Channel islands and the Carribean according to transcripts of Tudjman’s conversations obtained by The Sunday Times.

Evidence has emerged, The Sunday Times goes on to say, that Croatian officials enriched themselves and their families by manipulating privatisation transactions and by handing out lucrative state contracts and loans that were never repaid.”
In one financial scandal Franjo Tudjman’s main political advisor Ivic Pasalic arranged the sale of part of a national mobile telephone concession to Deutsche Telekom in 1999for 60 million pounds.

Proceeds deposited in an Irish bank account.

No naming and shaming envisaged for these and other beneficiaries and who knows possibly creators of the era of the Celtic Tiger.
Tax amnestied funds.

Alice in Wonderland territory complete with all the logic of the Mad Hatter.
The State inaugurates a tax amnesty facility to avail of funds requiring no identification as to source since this might be embarrassing all round.
Tax consultants advise Irish and international investors as to the desirability of depositing funds in tax havens and non resident accounts and off shore facilities in a climate of wholesale corporate fraud and chicanery reminiscent of nothing so much as the glory days of the Tammany Hall administration in New York in a bygone though fondly remembered era.

Might it not be said that many of the men and women named and shamed publicly in Ireland have been the victims of a kind of entrapment programme with the initiators of that programme getting off scot free ?

As for those who have joined in this latter day witch hunt to decry fraud they might well consider that in this day and age it has become an institutionalised way of life..
The war on Iraq for example.

Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle advisors to President Bush have recently acknowledged the “weapons of mass destruction” thesis to have been pure fabrication.

Foist upon a gullible public to engender support for a war on Iraq and occupation of that country as part of a programme geared to securing all the oil fields in the Middle East according to some sources.

Wars for corporate profit funded by taxpayers generally. Named and shamed and otherwise.

Yours faithfully,

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