This London Firm Helps the Wealthy Hide Assets - or Steal Them. Luckily We Have 15 Years of Their Client Communications

http://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/24/this-london-firm-helps-the-wealthy-hide-assets-or-steal-them-luckily-we-have-15-years-of-their-client-communications/
Date Written:  2019-07-24
Publisher:  CounterPunch
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23753

A London firm that helps the rich hide or steal money has had 15 years' worth of communications leaked. These are being made available to hopefully help return stolen money.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

It is my cheerful duty to announce the acquisition of around 85 gigabytes of leaked emails, phone calls, faxes, and other documents originating from the London-based tax shelter firm Formations House.... best known to the global kleptocracy as a cheap and discreet option by which to avoid taxes or steal them altogether. These materials, which cover fifteen years from the company's founding in 2001, were recently obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets, the transparency organization founded by longtime researcher, activist, and Freedom of Information Act request record-holder Emma Best to facilitate and host leaks from state and corporate actors. My own non-profit Pursuance, meanwhile, has partnered with DDOS to help oversee early access by reporters, and thereafter to implement experimental crowd-sourced research protocols by which networks of volunteers will sift through this immense field of data to better ensure that critical stories are discovered and made public over the coming months and years.

Formations is among the considerable number of firms that have proliferated in recent decades to provide a focused array of financial services to clients around the globe....

The most important stories that will gradually be yielded from these materials will concern the looting of public resources, which institutions across the West have continued to facilitate despite the incalculable damage that results to entire populations.