Thanks to favorable laws that make it an ideal refuge for the world’s wealth, America now sits at the center of the global offshore economy—an international pot of riches even larger than the GDP of China, by some estimates.
Journalistic investigations like the Panama Papers and Pandora Papers have helped expose the scourge of shell companies that are the linchpins of these offshore networks. Such corporate formations—which provide anonymity to the people behind them and are largely impenetrable to authorities trying to track the money—are not unique to the US. But the US has gone far beyond most other countries in the level of secrecy that it provides, and it has done so at a far greater clip than any of its peers.
Pick a case of international kleptocracy, and you are likely to discover a link to US properties. It’s not just mega-mansions, luxury apartments, and beachfront hotels. American manufacturing plants, oil wells, timberland, and more are wide open to anyone with the right number of zeros in their bank account balance. Depositing ill-gotten gains into US properties allows crooks to wipe their fingerprints off the money. Meanwhile, real estate agents and companies have enjoyed record profits. Naturally, setting up anonymous shell companies was also a popular theme. Doing so would obscure the ties between a company and its owner, and having a lawyer incorporate the company might allow them to claim attorney-client privilege.
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