At a time when New York State’s budget is reeling from Wall Street tax losses — Wall Street pays 20 to 30 percent of revenues — you’d think Governor David Paterson would want to recoup all the evaded taxes he could get. That doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to corporations that launder their profits offshore.
Paterson refused to deal with the issue and instead answered a question I hadn‘t asked. I wonder why. Does that mean he won’t go after corporate tax evaders? Here is the exchange from the Council‘s transcript of David Patterson meeting.
President Barack Obama said he would crack down on firms that use offshore centres to evade taxes. He could begin with a New York subsidiary of one of the world’s largest private banks, which used a Cayman Islands company to shift its profits.
Why would a New York investment fund manager run operations through an office in the Caymans? This type of structure is for optimising taxes, explained Max Obrist, a Cayman Islands official of the global Julius Baer Group (Zurich).
He told IPS that generating the income where a company was actually based, you would pay much more taxes. Obrist was describing a company shifting claimed earnings to tax havens to evade home taxes. He allegedly helped Julius Baer Investment Management (JBIM) New York do just that.
A revival of this impressive dance-theater piece first presented in 1984, is a powerful, sensual, emotional evocation of man‘s trajectory from heaven to hell, from the innocence of joy to repression and brutality. The eleven dancers of the company are notably talented, able to bend their bodies to gracefully walk doubled over as animals or pre-humans in the scene of origins, to move and twist with grace, to fly upside-down on wires, to present faces as expressive as their bodies as they show the pinched and frightened visages of people under repression. It‘s a performance you will not forget.
As U.S. workers are fired by corporate executives who take multi-million-dollar bonuses, “Billy Elliot, The Musical” seems made to order for the current American stage. It is a call for solidarity against those in power. It‘s a very British class-conscious play, with workers raising their fists to a giant puppet of 1980‘s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It also tells a universal truth that political struggles must also defend personal freedom.
Tom Stoppard‘s adaptation of Chekov‘s “The Cherry Orchard” is the perfect companion piece to his 2002 Russian trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia.” The trilogy told about the formation and early activities of the 19th- century Russian revolutionaries who fought the aristocratic class headed by the Czar. Chekov‘s 1904 play describes the frivolous, aristocratic leisure class which hasn‘t a clue that it is being swept away by embryonic capitalists, while downtrodden workers and peasants wait in the background, ready to join up with Stoppard‘s radicals.
This is yet another Forbidden Broadway production in which the numbers are sometimes better than the musicals they satirize. And they are always on target about the shows and the theatrical culture. The performers, Christina Bianco, Jared Bradshaw, Gina Kreiezmar and Michael West, start out by introducing themselves and declaring, “We‘ll do twelve steps the Fosse way!” Here are some of my nutty favorites. Alas, you can‘t really get a sense of it without the music. (Check out the show‘s website for some songs.)
Con men make good anti-heroes. At a time when the country is focused on a spectacular one that cheated people of billions, it’s instructive to take a look at the genre. Pal Joey, the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart 1940 musical given a moody revival by director Joe Mantello at the Roundabout Theatre, is about a sleazy character on the make for money and success. Joey’s take was a lot smaller than Bernard Madoff’s, but the essential immorality of the character – and the con man’s ability to charm and persuade — is the same. The new book is by Richard Greenberg, based on the original by John O’Hara.
U.S. Senators at Timothy Geithner’s confirmation hearing for Treasury Secretary Wednesday may want to ask him about a failure to act that is costing the U.S. a lot more than the amount he evaded on taxes.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which he has led since 2003, conducts the operations on Wall Street of the Federal Reserve in Washington, the country’s central bank.
The New York Fed under Geithner’s presidency has failed to stop massive naked short selling of U.S. Treasury bonds that threatens the stability of the market and sale of the bonds.
Ironically, the scam, enabled by a lack of regulation at the behest of Wall Street brokerage houses, makes it more expensive for the U.S. to bail out those same financial institutions.
Personal demons rooted in a childhood traumatized by religion and repressed sexuality move this powerful play by Peter Shaffer, first staged in 1973. It is vividly directed by Thea Sharrock who brings an emotional intensity to the mysterious tale.
A troubled 17-year-old youth, Alan Strang (Daniel Radcliffe) is brought by a judge (Kate Mulgew) to the office of an overworked psychiatrist in a provincial hospital in southern England. He has blinded a stable of six horses. Slowly, through importuning, bribes of small gifts and even hypnotism, the psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (Richard Griffiths) gets him to see through his nightmares and tell what brought him to commit this horror.
Gordon Brown and Barack Obama are both promising to crack down on the use of offshore tax havens. But putting those tough words into practice is another matter.
One of the world’s biggest private wealth management groups circulates funds via offices in the Cayman Islands, claiming they take major investment decisions ” when the main work is apparently carried out in London.
With offices in London and across the globe, Swiss-based Julius Baer banking group invests over $300 billion ( £208 billion) in assets on behalf of institutions and wealthy individuals. Profits in 2007 were more than $1.1 billion.
In London, one of its units was known as Julius Baer Investors or Julius Baer Investment Management (JBIM) until a management buyout in 2007. It was renamed Augustus Asset Managers, is based in Bevis Marks in the City, and is still 10% owned by Julius Baer.
From London, Augustus controls assets of $12 billion but claims its profits are generated elsewhere, offshore at a Cayman Islands Baer subsidiary called Baer Select Management.
Why? Simple, really. “If you would generate all the income in London, you would pay much more taxes,” acknowledged Max Obrist, a Cayman Islands executive of Julius Baer.
TV interview about the Allen Stanford case and the Sodexo kickbacks revealed by whistleblowers Jay and John Carciero on Conversations with Harold Channer, Oct 29, 2009, MNN – Channel 34, New York. You Tube. One hour. And more.
Arthur Miller’s play about corporate corruption never goes out of fashion. As a theater device, he focused on a small factory owned by one man, but you can take this as a representation of what went on and what goes on when anything goes in business. Profits trump morals. The victims are all of us, which is what the title means. Simon McBurney’s production is smooth and riveting, with a cast that acts with the fluidity of an ensemble.
The financial crisis has the U.S. swirling with charges about the immoral greed of some corporate executives who recklessly bet their companies’ futures to line their own pockets. The popular fix for this international calamity stops at the nation’s borders: decouple top-line salaries and bonuses from stock prices and institute more transparency and regulation.
However, last month, the Vatican, in a groundbreaking statement, linked the financial crisis to a much deeper problem largely ignored in discussions of the crisis here. It underlined the need to consider carefully the hidden but crucial role of the offshore financial system in light of the emergence of the global financial crisis.
The Vatican now gets it, but U.S. corporations don’t. The U.S.-based multinationals that signed on to yet another ethics pledge included General Electric, The Hartford, Pepsi, Wal-Mart, Accenture, Dell, and United Airlines. Their ethics, according to their pledge, does not include rejecting the use of the offshore system to evade regulation as well as taxes.
American International Group (AIG) operated a captive insurance scam that involved fraudulent use of offshore tax havens. Currently, the U.S. government has invested over $40 billion in AIG, with the U.S. getting nearly 80 percent of its stock.
This puts the U.S. in a unique position to investigate the internal operations of a giant corporation with a reputation for using the offshore system for tax evasion.
U.S. authorities could begin their investigations with a look into a very curious practice that was revealed 15 years ago in a case that was never exposed by the mainstream press and which insurance insiders say is endemic.
AIG would keep a portion of a client’s inflated insurance premium and send the rest to the client’s offshore reinsurance company. AIG would earn a higher commission. The client would write off the entire amount as a business expense and enjoy the extra cash offshore, tax free.
This story tells how notorious fraudster Victor Posner made an AIG deal to stash reinsurance profits in Bermuda.
At a time in the U.S. when most films seem made for retarded 13-year-olds, this revival of David Mamet’s 1988 Speed the Plow directed by Neil Pepe, is right on target. It’s a satire on Hollywood moguls on the make for money and success, which they see strewn along the paths of titillating sex and violence. Hey, how else to get a lunch table at the town’s favored watering hole?
Then a sweet, wide-eyed naive young woman who is working at the studio as a temp is called in to do some secretarial tasks. She ends up challenging Bobby to make a film that matters. Why should it all be garbage? she insists.
It might seem odd at first to compare them, but “Beast”, a brutal, surreal black comedy about the Iraq war, has something in common with “The Files”, a stunning, sardonic docudrama about the repression of cultural freedom by the Polish communist secret police.
They are theatres of the absurd, though in the Poles‘ case, the tales they tell are very literally true. Both plays, staged off-Broadway in New York, are attacks on criminal acts of governments.
For decades, playwrights writing realistically about the black experience in the United States could not get their works produced, black directors didn’t get jobs, and even the most successful performers were confined to roles as servants in plays about whites.
First produced in 1975, The First Breeze of Summer by Leslie Lee was one of the early U.S. theatre works about black life.
Broken dreams lie behind the grit of the elderly woman at the centre of this play about the tribulations of being black and female in the U.S. South. Gremmar — as her grandsons call her — raised three children by different fathers, none a husband, each offering a hope that was dashed on the rocks of racial prejudice or the sexual double standard.
The scene is 1977 in Lagos, Nigeria. Film projections show people racing frantically to escape the thousand troops who have surrounded and invaded Kalakuta, the communal living space and recording studio of musician-songwriter, Fela Anikulapo Kuti.
In a handful of years, Fela had become a worldwide music phenomenon and trenchant political critic of the regime.
How could the songs of one man be deemed such a political threat that the president, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, seeks to destroy him so brutally?
FELA!, a stunning U.S. musical theatre piece premiering in New York, tells the story using Fela’s own radical lyrics set to the Afrobeat he created out of jazz, African rhythms, funk and reggae. The play is a stirring musical indictment of decades of misrule by Nigeria’s thuggish military dictators
From alleged kickbacks to Aristide to a company that’s tanking.
Jim Courter, the former New Jersey Republican Congressman who quit as a McCain national finance co-chair after IDT, the global telecommunications company he heads, was fined $1.3 million by the Federal Communications Commission, now has much bigger problems. IDT announced Friday that Courter will quit the company. IDT‘s filing with the SEC the same day shows the company in a free fall. Its stock is tanking, and the New York Stock Exchange has threatened to delist it.
The FCC fine imposed for IDT‘s failure to file its contract with Haiti was first reported by the author in July. The contract revealed that IDT was sending Haiti fees to a Turks & Caicos shell company instead of to a Haiti Teleco account. A whistleblower charged kickbacks.
The company said Courter would leave as CEO when his contract expires next October. In the meantime, his 2009 salary will be paid entirely in stock, which he cannot cash in till his departure. That could mean paltry pickings. IDT stock has fallen to 69 cents from more than $24 in 2004 and $1.93 in June.
IDT could be in for some more trouble with the FCC if a new administration decides to enforce its regulations. According to FCC responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, IDT has never filed its contracts with any of the 140 major international carriers to which it claims to supply service. This violation could bring fines of $7,000 a day for each case, but the agency has given the company a pass on obeying its rules.
Michael Glassner, in charge of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin‘s campaign operations, was till April 18th a vice-president of IDT, the New Jersey-based telecom fined $1.3 million by the FCC in July for failing to file its Haiti contract.
The contract, effective in 2004, revealed payments to an offshore shell company in the Turks & Caicos which sent only part of the fees to Haiti‘s phone company. The case is under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. A former IDT insider, Michael Jewett, who managed the company’s Caribbean region, says the missing money represented kickbacks to former Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
The suave hero is racing over moors, pursued by a small bi-plane, while on a hill to the side, a familiar figure watches. It is Alfred Hitchcock, who regularly shows up in his mystery thrillers. Except this isn‘t cinema, it‘s theater, and old Alfie is a tiny Indonesian-style shadow puppet. It‘s a scene from Maria Aitken‘s enormously clever production of Patrick Barlow‘s parody of Hitchcocks “The 39 Steps.” You‘ve never seen anything like it.
It is 1935, just the right year for a film noir spy drama actually made by Hitchcock in that pre-war time and centered around a devilish villain whose accent becomes more Germanic as his malevolent plot is revealed.
In a year when race is an undercurrent in America‘s presidential election, it is fitting that the smash musical of the Broadway season is “South Pacific,” a play first presented nearly 60 years ago on the theme of intolerance.
Based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener, who served in the region during World War II, the play turns on the anti-Polynesian prejudice of the heroine, young Navy nurse Nellie Forbush (a vibrant Kelli O‘Hara), who is posted to a war-time island base of the U.S. Navy.
While “South Pacific” has been celebrated around the world for its joyous, clever, entertaining musical numbers, and director Bartlett Sher‘s staging is exhilarating, it‘s worth looking at how the show presents its message.
Madame Lyubov Andreievna Ranevskaya returns to Russia from Paris, where her finances have been exhausted by the extravagance of her lover and life style. She is devoted to the family estate, especially the cherry orchard, and wants to save it from a threatening debt.
Fast forward about a century from Anton Chekhov to American playwright A.R. Gurney. With the help of a smooth, light-hearted production by director Mark Lamos, Gurney weaves the Chekhov story into “Buffalo Gal,” an often wry tale of Amanda (Susan Sullivan), who is drawn to her childhood home but has to deal with economic realities.
Edwina, played by de’Adre Aziza, has her eye on the Youth (Daniel Breaker).
She informs him, And after we marry and you’ve got a job in the corporate sector, you’ll buy me a sprawling two-story house fulla African sculptures from tribes we know nothing about, kente cloth couch covers, and Malcolm X commemorative plates lining the walls of our airy, peach-coloured breakfast nook?
Who says leftists don’t have a sense of humour? Welcome to Passing Strange, a witty, inventive satire on Broadway about growing up, rebellious, bourgeois and black in Los Angeles and leaving before 20 to explore the radical corners of Europe.
The suave hero is racing over moors, pursued by a small bi-plane, while on a hill to the side, a familiar figure watches. It is Alfred Hitchcock, who regularly shows up in his mystery thrillers. Except this isn‘t cinema, it‘s theater, and old Alfie is a tiny Indonesian-style shadow puppet. It‘s a scene from Maria Aitken‘s enormously clever production of Patrick Barlow‘s parody of Hitchcocks “The 39 Steps.” You‘ve never seen anything like it.
from Paris, where her finances have been exhausted by the extravagance of her lover and life style. She is devoted to the family estate, especially the cherry orchard, and wants to save it from a threatening debt.