George brings this to our attention:
The UK Government worked to include language about discrimination in the FATCA IGA.
j) The Financial Institution must not have policies or practices that
discriminate against opening or maintaining accounts for individuals
who are Specified US Persons and who are residents of the UK.
But was that nothing more than window dressing?
Bloomberg reports that the US plans to fine a French bank US $10 billion:
U.S. authorities are seeking to impose the fine to settle allegations that BNP transferred funds for clients in violation of sanctions against Sudan, Iran, and Cuba, according to people familiar with the investigation. The fine could be the largest criminal penalty in the U.S., eclipsing BP Plc’s $4 billion accord with the Justice Department last year.
I have little sympathy for banksters and politicians who are essentially arguing over how they going to divide the spoils of the middle class. But this $10 billion fine of France is a particular arrogant treatment of an “ally” and has the potential of helping the anti-FATCA movement. It is an especially egregious example of how the US determines that its laws have international jurisdiction and has set about confiscating the world’s wealth through its banking hegemony. If the US keeps this up, expect the rest of the world to join Russia and China economic coalition against the US.
Hat tip, Zerohedge: France Furious At US $10 Billion BNP “Masterful Slap”, “Racketeering” Fine
We’ll be getting together for lunch Saturday, 7 June, at 1:30 pm at the Flying Banzini, 1242 Wellington Street West, Ottawa. The Flying Banzini specialises in sandwiches and desserts and there’s plenty of on-street parking.
Hope you can make it! Please rsvp by posting a comment here or e-mail me at pacifica.isaacbrocksociety@gmail.com
A simple data mash-up I’m surprised I’ve never seen before: number of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) vs. number of people who bought a U.S. green card through the EB-5 investor visa programme in the past five years, by country or region. The former number comes from Capgemini’s 2013 World Wealth Report (WWR), specifically the section on HNWI population estimates; the latter number comes from the State Department’s Report of the Visa Office, specifically Table VI, Part IV for each year.
| How many HNWIs in each country or region obtained EB-5 green cards in 2009–2013? | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 |
1 in 29 | ||
| 1 in 64 | |||
| 1 in 128 | |||
| 1 in 256 | |||
| 1 in 512 | |||
| 1 in 1,024 | |||
| 1 in 2,048 | |||
| 1 in 4,096 | |||
| 1 in 8,192 | |||
| 1 in 11,643 | |||
Note that except for certain countries, the WWR only provided estimates of HNWIs on a regional basis. The above map was thus coloured in by taking the total of EB-5s for the region and dividing it by the number of HNWIs; this means that some countries in the map are coloured in according to the average for the broader region, even though no one at all from that country got an EB-5 in the five-year period in question. Where the WWR did provide a country-specific estimate of the number of HNWIs, the country is outlined in black, except for Hong Kong and Singapore which are circled.
Well, I hope that our technical problems have finally come to an end. Problems Wednesday were about changing our domain registration to a new ISP (internet service provider), which required time for “prorogation”. I myself didn’t have access until Thursday morning. Then the normal Brock traffic simply overwhelmed our shared server service which was promoted by the ISP but turned out to be thoroughly inadequate for our needs. That’s when we started getting the account suspended message–and no, that wasn’t because you put some bad language in a comment. So we had to change to a new platform which is more robust and will hopefully carry us into the next year.
For those naysayers of Isaac Brock–and boy do we ever have them, I have a message. Take for example Kim Moody, who wrote:
I’d been meaning to post this earlier, but the Government Accountability Office produced another OVDP report in February: “IRS’s Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program: 2009 Participation by State and Location of Foreign Bank Accounts”. This was in response to a request by Carl Levin, and follows up on their previous demonisation of people who don’t want to enter the OVDP.
Naturally, most media sources noticed only the high-profile facts that Carl Levin & the GAO want them to: OVDP participants are located in high-income states and many of them had Swiss bank accounts. Forbes, for example, ran it under the sensationalistic and deeply-misleading headline “Where Offshore Tax Evaders Live and Bank”. However, as we’ve repeatedly emphasised here at the Isaac Brock Society, the major effect of the OVDP has been to terrorise minnows with personal connections to foreign countries — immigrants, emigrants, and their spouses and children — who innocently organised their financial lives around their personal connections.
A bit of digging and calculator work with the GAO’s latest report offers even more evidence to support what we’ve been saying here all along. The U.S. states with the most OVDP participants were precisely the states with the highest foreign-born population. And besides Switzerland, the countries where most OVDP participants had their bank accounts were precisely those countries where high proportions of American emigrants have gone to live or those countries whence high proportions of foreign workers in the U.S. have come.
Update
These seminars will include discussion and analysis of the IRS “relaxed opportunities” for people to come into compliance.
“Life planning, career planning and the reality of U.S. citizenship for Americans abroad”
“Everything I wish I had known, but couldn’t even have imagined to ask!”
During the winter, John Richardson presented a number of seminars for those concerned with the obvious problems of U.S. citizenship (including the “threshold question” of whether you really are a U.S. citizen).
Seminar topics have invariably included the problems of: FBAR, FATCA, investing, retirement planning, mutual funds, U.S. tax compliance, renunciation, etc. The official “FATCA Launch” of July 1, 2014 will surely make the existing problems worse.
U.S. citizens living outside the United States are subject to a regime of rules that diminish their “life opportunities”. These rules are such that U.S. citizens abroad live at a disadvantage relative to the citizens of any other nation. Those attending previous seminars have been primarily “middle aged” people, who have attempted to plan for their retirement, only to find that their retirement plans are threatened, because of their birth in the United States.
A shared sentiment has been:
“If only, I had known about these rules earlier … This is information that my children and other young adults need to hear! What does all this mean for my children?”
The seminar on June 22 will be a session specifically designed for your children and young adults. They will be exposed to (at least “some”) of that information that they need to hear!
Continue reading
This post appeared on the RenounceUScitizenship blog.
This post was based on a “comment that deserves a place in the Isaac Brock Hall of Fame” left by @AtticusinCanada on the original Forbes article by Robert Wood. I took the comment and created a separate post out of it.
Atticus then left the following comment to this post:
Well, this is a stellar article and a great way to frame Mr. Wood’s article as well. I grow very tired of ignorant back lash from people who couldn’t dream that one day they may wake up and find the U.S. has decided they too need to lose their citizenship through no fault of their own. If it can happen to us, it can happen to them. And when the U.S. is done with you, you get to endure being called an ingrate swine, and told not to let the door hit you on the way out. U.S. citizens need to wake up and face squarely what their country is doing and if there is an ounce of morality in them stand up and say this is wrong.
Some of these Homelanders are suffering from severe distortions of reality.
Now that we’ve arrived at 10,000,000 hits, it is time to move to a more robust platform. My personal thanks to our software developer who has worked hard as a volunteer to make this happen.
