Tax evasion through the creation of offshore financial centres (OFCs) is usually blamed on the islands that were formerly part of Britain – Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, and the Cayman Islands are usually the worst culprits – but a new paper from a group of academics working in the Netherlands points to major western economies as the worst offenders. The paper identifies a small set of five countries – the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore, and Switzerland – that are responsible for funneling the majority of corporate offshore investment, as what it terms conduit-OFCs.
