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TREASURE ISLANDS

This excellent book...

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- Irish TimesHOMETHE BOOKTHE AUTHORTHE ARGUMENTSPRAISEUPDATES AND

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Jun

15

2011

Banks are the biggest corporate users of tax havens by far

Posted by:Nick Shaxsonin:Thoughts

The first paragraph of the Introduction in Treasure Islands finishes with this sentence:

In each country, the largest user by far was a bank.

This is about the biggest users of tax havens among corporations around the

world.The purpose of this blog is to point to the data sources this relies on. None of

this data is new nevertheless the data itself, and some of the nuances in it, are

striking.

First, theres the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) whose rankings, in

terms of numbers of tax haven subsidiaries, go like this

Citigroup 427 subsidiaries

Morgan Stanley 273

News Corporation 152

Bank of America 115

Procter & Gamble 83

Pfizer 80

Marathon Oil 76

Pepsico 70

Wachovia 59

Lehman 57

JP Morgan 50

The ones in bold are the financials though note the predominance of pharmaceutical

companies and one important (ahem!) media company. Also note that the GAO uses arestrictive list (p12) of tax havens, missing out such massive players as the

Netherlands and the UK (for a better list, see here.)

This is complemented by a survey of the Netherlands, the UK and France. Whereas

the GAO only found that 83% of top U.S. cos had tax haven subsidiaries, this survey

finds that:

As in the USA, the largest user of tax havens in France and the UK was a bank. In the

USA the largest user was Citigroup, in France it was BNP Paribas and in the UK it

was Barclays plc.

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The report surveyed 95 of the largest quoted companies in the UK, the Netherlands

and France. Of those companies all but one had tax haven subsidiaries. 99 per cent of

the European quoted companies surveyed operate in tax havens. The most popular tax

haven in the world is Cayman Islands.

And there was this, providing more fine-grained detail:

All the UK companies had tax haven subsidiaries. Barclays plc had the most (315),

just beating BP plc (294) into second place. The Netherlands produced just one

company (from a sample of 23) without a tax haven subsidiary. In France all of the 39

companies surveyed had at least one tax haven subsidiary. BNP Paribas had most with

a total of 189.

Following this, the Swiss magazine Hebdo published its own study. It does something

different: it considers subsidiaries in the UK and Delaware and discovers the banks

use of these places to be massive. The top of the list are:

Credit Suisse 97 (tax haven subsidiaries represent 49% of all its

subsidiaries)

Zurich Financial Services 89 (47%)

Swiss Re 83 (60%)

UBS 80 (42%)

Nestl 80 (17%)

This brings interesting new perspectives. Again, the biggest tax haven users by far are

banks. And banks have an unusual share of their activities in tax havens the other

companies listed have a far smaller share of their total subsidiaries in tax havens.

So there you have it. The data. And its quite striking, isnt it?

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one comment

FT: over 90 UK PFI projects moved offshore | Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the

men who stole the world | A book by Nicholas Shaxson

6th June, 2011

3.36 pm

[...] dont forget: the banks are the biggest users of tax [...]

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