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May 31, 2010
Barclays gags Guardian over tax
Injunction forces news website to remove seven leaked memos showing how bank avoided hundreds of millions of pounds in tax
The Guardian
Gustav Peebles, co-author of the Atlantic Yards-economic-bonanza-debunking Kim/Peebles Report [PDF], happened across this March, 2009 Guardian piece about Barclays, a company that makes BP look like the Park Slope Food Coop.
Barclays Bank obtained a court order early today banning the Guardian from publishing documents which showed how the bank set up companies to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds in tax.
...The internal Barclays memos – leaked by a Barclays whistleblower – showed executives from SCM, Barclays's structured capital markets division, seeking approval for a 2007 plan to sink more than $16bn (£11.4bn) into US loans.
Tax benefits were to be generated by an elaborate circuit of Cayman islands companies, US partnerships and Luxembourg subsidiaries.
The documents had been leaked to Cable by a former employee of the bank, who wrote a long account of how the bank works.
The anonymous whistleblower wrote to Cable: "The last year has seen the global taxpayer having to rescue the global financial system. The taxpayer has already had a gun put to their head and been told to pay up or watch the financial system and life as we know it disappear into a black hole.
NoLandGrab: Tax-cheating, gag-ordering British banks, Russian billionaire oligarchs "self-made" through back-room deals — such is the company Bruce Ratner keeps.
Posted by eric at May 31, 2010 9:33 AM