The Center for Public Integrity

A number of so-called nominee directors of companies registered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) have connections to military or intelligence activities, an investigation has revealed.

In the past, the British arms giant BAE was the most notorious user of offshore secrecy. The Guardian in 2003 revealed the firm had set up a pair of covert BVI entities.

The undeclared subsidiaries were used to distribute hundreds of millions of pounds in secret payments to get overseas arms contracts.

Today the investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Guardian uncovers the identities of other offshore operators.

Louthean Nelson owns the Gamma Group, a controversial computer surveillance firm employing ex-military personnel. It sells bugging technology to Middle East and south-east Asian governments.

Nelson owns a BVI offshore arm, Gamma Group International Ltd.

Gamma's spyware, which can be used against dissidents, has turned up in the hands of both Egyptian and Bahraini state security police, although Nelson's representative claims this happened inadvertently.

He initially denied to us that Nelson was linked to Gamma, and denied that Nelson owned the anonymous BVI affiliate.

Martin Muench, who has a 15 per cent share in the company's German subsidiary, said he was the group's sole press spokesman, and told us: "Louthean Nelson is not associated with any company by the name of Gamma Group International Ltd. If by chance you are referring to any other Gamma company, then the explanation is the same for each and every one of them."

Britain’s friendly regime of offshore secrecy has tempted an extraordinary array of post-Soviet billionaires to descend on London, sometimes to the sound of gunfire.

These billionaires justify their use of British-controlled secrecy jurisdictions because they say they must protect themselves from corporate predators and political enemies in their home countries.

Vladimir Antonov fled permanently to Britain after his father, Alexander, was gunned down in a Moscow street in 2009. Another associate, German Gorbuntsov, narrowly survived a volley of shots in London last March.

When Antonov bought a luxury yacht in Antibes, the Sea D, he was careful to register its ownership to an anonymous British Virgin Islands (BVI) entity, Danforth Ventures Inc.

He also got his hands on enough cash to try to take over the ailing Swedish car manufacturer Saab, though he did not take control. He did succeed for a while in owning Portsmouth FC, the even more ailing British football club.

Antonov is currently on bail in Britain. Lithuanian authorities are trying to extradite him for allegedly looting their collapsed bank Snoras, which he denies.

The allegation that oligarchs exploit Britain’s offshore secrecy regime to shift assets out of their own countries is not an uncommon one. Another refugee from the law is the Kazakh billionaire Mukhtar Ablyazov, who was last seen in February allegedly heading out of London on a coach to France.

Ablyazov has been sentenced to 22 months in jail for contempt of a UK court as the BTA Bank in Kazakhstan attempts to pursue his maze of offshore assets. The bank’s lawyers claim Ablyazov, who denies it, has made off with an astonishing £4 billion using BVI and Seychelles companies, nominee directors and layers of front-men.

Click through to ICIJ.org to continue reading.

Selective trusts and companies born in the British Virgin Islands have helped anonymous buyers snap up luxury properties in London and other UK locales.

Today we are setting out to demolish the wall of offshore secrecy that hides many UK property transactions.

In our joint investigation with The Guardian, we disclose the identities of some of the people secretly buying up Britain.

Our findings, covering nearly 60 sample premises, demonstrate the way the UK is turning into a property speculators' haven, thanks to tax loopholes and the secrecy offered by the British Virgin Islands. Anonymous buyers are taking over more and more blocks of luxury housing, particularly in London.

Some purchasers live abroad. Other buyers live in the UK itself while they build up property empires using these artificial structures.

Click through to ICIJ.org to continue reading.

The existence of a global network of sham company directors, most of them British, can be revealed today.

The UK government claims such abuses were stamped out long ago, but a worldwide joint investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Guardian, and BBC's Panorama, has uncovered a booming offshore industry that leaves the way open both for tax avoidance and the concealment of assets.

This is the first installment of ICIJ's worldwide research effort which will identify, country-by-country, thousands of the true owners of offshore companies.

One part of our research identified more than 19,000 companies who use a group of some 20 so-called nominee directors. The nominees play a key role in keeping hundreds of thousands of commercial transactions secret. They do so by selling their names for use on official company documents, whilst giving addresses in obscure locations all over the world.

Hiding behind nominee fronts are the real owners. They are of widely varying types, ranging from Russian oligarchs to perfectly legal but discreet speculators in the British property market. Their only common factor: the wish for secrecy.

Click through to ICIJ.org to continue reading.

Florida’s Senate approved a new set of ethics rules today that will strengthen the body’s conflict of interest guidelines. The vote marked the first action to emerge from a vocal push for ethics reform by the state’s incoming legislative leaders.

Senate President Don Gaetz, who took control during today’s organizational meeting, proposed the rules Monday after committing to reforms during the election season.

"I hope that's the first step in many steps we are able to take in the Senate and House when it comes to ethics," Gaetz told the Miami Herald, adding that he’d also like to strengthen the enforcement powers of the Florida Commission on Ethics, which oversees ethics rules. Gaetz joined the Senate in 2006 after a long career as a health care executive.

The rules require senators to take an ethics course every other year and bars them from voting on issues in which they have a conflict of interest — though it will be up to them to decide. Previously, senators were allowed to vote whether or not they judged themselves to have a conflict, and were not required to disclose the conflict until after voting. The new rules also specify that the measure extends to potential financial gain by family members and business associates.

In the aftermath of the Nov. 6 elections, words like “fickle” and “schizophrenic” are being bandied about to describe the Wisconsin electorate.

How else can anyone explain a group of voters who simultaneously picked Democrats Barack Obama for president and Tammy Baldwin for U.S. Senate while preserving a 5-3 Republican edge in its congressional delegation and giving the GOP a commanding majority in both houses of the state Legislature?

But the vote tallies in Wisconsin’s congressional and state legislative races were not nearly as lopsided as the parties’ resulting share of seats, according to a Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism analysis. The breakdown between Republican and Democratic votes was close even in the races for Congress and state Legislature, where the GOP scored substantial wins.

Some election observers say these results, which ensure that Republican Gov. Scott Walker will have strong GOP majorities heading into the next legislative session, owe largely to redistricting — the redrawing of voting district boundaries based on the U.S. Census.

“The outcome of this year's U.S. House as well as state Senate and state Assembly elections testify to the power of redistricting,” said Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan clean-government advocacy group.

For instance, Republicans received 49 percent of the 2.9 million votes cast in Wisconsin’s congressional races, but won five out of eight, or 62.5 percent, of the seats, according to the Center’s analysis. The Center analyzed unofficial 2012 results reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and official 2010 results from the state Government Accountability Board.

In its latest issue, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet warns about the dangers of “profiteering” in the $1 billion international trade on human tissue and the lack of sufficient regulation worldwide – echoing the findings of an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists seriesearlier this year.

The November 10 issue of The Lancet – one of the world’s leading medical journals -- said that “profiteering threatens the altruism of tissue donation” and that doctors and health agencies in many nations have trouble tracing improperly-obtained bones, skin and tissue when problems occur. 

The Lancet article highlighted case studies and major concerns contained in last July’s four-part ICIJ series, including the legal consequences of stolen tissue implanted in hundreds of patients because of convicted body-snatcher Michael Mastromarino, now in a New York prison. 

The Lancet said the for-profit tissue industry “is not as tightly regulated as organ donation worldwide”. Voluntary donors -- and many families who allowed the use of loved ones’ bodies after death -- are not fully aware of the money-making uses of bones, tissue and skin for such things as cosmetic surgery and dental repairs, it said.

Legislators in South Carolina have taken initial steps toward what could be the first major overhaul of the state’s ethics rules in twenty years. As the Free Times reported this morning, government watchdog groups rattled off their wish lists at a hearing held last week by a panel of state House Democrats. South Carolina earned an overall grade of F for corruption risk from the State Integrity Investigation earlier this year, and fallout from that report — along with a series of recent ethics scandals — appears to have built political consensus on the need for reforms, said John Crangle of South Carolina Common Cause.

Among the changes called for at the hearing: more robust financial disclosure requirements, new rules on PACs and the creation of a more independent ethics oversight body. State leaders have formed four separate panels to help shape a reform package, one convened by each party in the state House, one by the majority Republicans in the Senate and one at the direction of GOP Gov. Nikki Haley.

The House Republican panel will hold its first hearing Thursday morning. Crangle said it’s too early to say whether the legislature will take recommendations from the panels and adopt substantive changes in the 2013 legislative session.

Read more at the Free Times.