The Center for Public Integrity

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.

When state legislators in Wisconsin began work last year on a plan for redistricting, the once-a-decade process when states draw new district maps for Congress and state legislatures, they found themselves presented with non-disclosure agreements requiring them to keep their deliberations confidential.

In Ohio, the Republican National Committee kicked off a training session on redistricting for state leaders by telling them to “keep it secret.”

Democratic leaders in Illinois held dozens of public hearings after promising a more open process. But all of the meetings came before the congressional redistricting maps were released, and the Democratic majority quickly approved their own proposals with little opportunity for the public, or Republicans, to voice concerns.

In the lead up to the most recent round of redistricting, which began last year with the release of data from the 2010 census, politicians, advocates and “good government” groups nationwide pushed to open the process to citizens and allow for broader debate than in the past. The idea was that a transparent process would lead to maps that made more sense geographically and   better reflected voters’ interests.

But with few exceptions, the political parties in control of statehouses rammed their own partisan proposals through the legislatures as quickly as possible, leaving little more than nominal opportunities for the public to influence the process. In several states, legislatures outsourced the actual work to lawyers and used claims of attorney-client privilege to further exclude the public.

In  South Dakota, the ease with which campaign cash moves around has mostly put power in the hands of those who already had it — the wealthy and the state's top elected officials.

Because of lax regulations regarding how money can flow into and out of political action committees, political party funds and individual candidate funds, the state's top officeholders are able to legally skirt existing fundraising limits and get relatively large sums into campaign coffers with little effort.

The lack of oversight was, in part, responsible for the Rushmore State’s "F" grade for regulation of political finances from the State Integrity Investigation, released earlier this year.

South Dakota is one of 19 states with a system of campaign finance regulation that allows money to effectively move "sideways," says Ed Bender, executive director of the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

South Dakota and 12 other states place no limits on what state parties or political action committees can give individual candidates, according to research done by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another six states limit PAC contributions but not party contributions.

Bender believes that this regulatory structure essentially makes South Dakota's $4,000 limit on individual contributions to campaigns irrelevant — by allowing individual contributions of up to $10,000 to go to friendly PACs that in turn give large sums — sometimes originating from a single source — to the candidate. South Dakota law allows wealthy donors to create multiple PACs, so even the $10,000 PAC giving limit can effectively  be moot.  PACS and political parties do have to report the source of their contributions.

Deep flaws in Massachusetts laws constructed to keep government honest have sustained a recurring parade of criminal and ethical misconduct charges involving public servants in the past five years, a study by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting shows.

Massachusetts earned a “C” grade earlier this year in a national State Integrity scorecard released by the Center for Public Integrity. Among its lowest scores were an “F” for the transparency of the state budget process and public access to information, a “D+” for legislative accountability and a “C-” for the effectiveness of the state Ethics Commission. Judicial accountability earned a “C+ in Massachusetts.

The anti-corruption weaknesses have been borne out in the litany of public scandals plaguing Massachusetts in recent years.They include federal convictions of two former House Speakers, federal criminal charges lodged against top state Probation officials and the federal bribery sentence imposed on a once-rising female legislator.  

At least 250 public servants in Massachusetts have been charged with crimes or ethics violations in the past five years, the NECIR analysis found. The charges range from the federal criminal cases to helping to hire friends and relatives to drug offenses. While government officials and watchdog groups say a corrupt public servant is going to find a way to break the law no matter what, wide cracks in accountability checks in Massachusetts have made it easier for misconduct to occur.