The massive leak of tax documents sent repercussions around the world as politicians and civic groups urged probe into officials and nationals named in those documents.
Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson faces a no-confidence vote in parliament amid revelations he and his wife had an investment account in the British Virgin Islands created with the aid of the Panama-based law firm at the center of a global tax evasion leak.
The opposition has called for a vote against the government as parliament began its session at 3pm local time. Protests were scheduled in Reykjavik starting two hours later.
Photo: EPA
“I hope that Sigmundur David realizes the seriousness of this matter and has the decency to resign before parliament convenes today,” Birgitta Jonsdottir, a lawmaker for the Pirate Party, said on her Facebook page yesterday.
Gunnlaugsson, who started his four-year term in 2013, finds himself in the middle of a political storm after it was revealed in a leak uncovered by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that he and his wife had an offshore account to manage an inheritance.
His wife, Anna Sigurlaug Palsdottir, previously revealed the account in a Facebook posting last month after the prime minister was questioned about the money.
The Australian Tax Office yesterday said it is investigating more than 800 wealthy clients of the Panama law firm for possible tax evasion.
The probe follows the reported leak of more than 11.5 million documents from the files of law firm Mossack Fonseca, based in the tax haven of Panama, revealing details of hundreds of thousands of clients.
“Currently we have identified more than 800 individual taxpayers and we have now linked more than 120 of them to an associate offshore service provider located in Hong Kong,” the Australian tax office said in a statement.
In New Zealand, the tax agency is “working closely” with its tax treaty partners to obtain full details of any New Zealand tax residents who may have been involved in arrangements facilitated by Mossack Fonseca, said John Nash, Inland Revenue’s international revenue strategy manager.
According to the Australian Financial Review, New Zealand’s foreign trust regime allowed Mossack Fonseca to create trusts in New Zealand to protect controversial assets.
New Zealand Labour Party opposition leader Andrew Little called on Prime Minister John Key to come clean about what he knows about New Zealand becoming a “haven for rich foreign investors looking to hide their fortunes in secret trust accounts.”
In Asia, a group representing current and former lawmakers from Southeast Asian countries said the trove of leaked documents shows how the wealthy and politically powerful have abused rules governing offshore tax havens, often to the detriment of their own communities.
The group, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, is calling for governments in the region to crack down on large scale corporate tax evasion and pursue more equitable tax regimes.
Malaysian lawmaker Charles Santiago, who chairs the group, said multinational corporations and individuals evading tax should be hauled up in their respective countries.
Russian media are keeping mum about the US$2 billion found in offshore accounts linked to close friends of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained