Julie Levesque: Money Laundering and Offshore Fraud for the Rich

Economic Austerity for the Poor. Offshore banking is the elephant in the global economic room, which the political and financial elite is trying to hide from the public view. While imposing austerity measures on hard working citizens, they are well aware that astronomical amounts of money are secretly held in offshore banks, thus lost in taxes. Where is that money from? What is it for? Drug cartels, fraud, tax evasion and money laundering are common answers to those questions. Despite this reality and even in this era of fiscal austerity, the question world leaders avoid is: Why is secret banking still allowed? Are they capable of putting a term to it, but unwilling to do it because of the benefits it provides? Clearly. Every once in a while a robber baron will serve as a scapegoat to give a pale illusion of justice to the common man. Although they deserve to be penalized, the corrupt banking system which allowed to operate remains inviolate and its flaws are never questioned . Offshore banking is not a parallel banking structure. It is at the heart of the banking system. All major banks have offshore subsidiaries. R Allen Stanford is one of the white collar criminals serving time for running a massive Ponzi scheme camouflaged as a bank, that sold some $7 billion in self styled certificates of deposit and $1.2 billion in mutual funds: SIBs chief financial officer James Davis told the Justice Department that his boss had been stealing from investors for decades, while paying bribes to regulators and even performing blood oaths never to reveal his secrets. And with connections and generous pay outs to US politicians going back more than a decade, 65% of which went to Democrats, including our change president, Allen Stanford was plugged in. Evidence also suggests he may have gotten an assist, covering his tracks from regulators and US secret state agencies, including the CIA. Allen Stanford did business the American way, he swindled depositors and then siphoned off the proceeds into a spiders web of offshore accounts.