How to punish the wealthy supporters of Vladimir Putin when tracing their money is so complicated?
Several renowned economists, including the French Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, the American Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, but also the French judge Eva Joly, urge the leaders of the G 20 to create a global register of assets in order to better target hidden fortunes.
"The case of the Russian oligarchs is eloquent" in the concealment of fortunes within opaque structures, they write in a letter published this Tuesday in the British daily The Guardian, on the eve of the holding, Wednesday, of the G 20 Finances, which will bring together all of the richest countries in the world.
Huge leaks of documents - in particular the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers - sometimes give a partial measure of this: the Russian multi-billionaires hold "at least 1,000 billion dollars of wealth abroad", according to their estimates relayed in the letter from the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT).
Already in mid-March, the European Union Tax Observatory, an independent think tank hosted by the Paris School of Economics, where Piketty teaches, had called on the EU to establish a complete register of the beneficial owners of companies. fictitious that abound in the world.
The Observatory estimated that half of the total wealth of Russian households was held abroad.
Read alsoUkraine: five minutes to understand the role of Russian oligarchs, targeted by economic sanctions
As Russia's invasion of Ukraine enters its 55th day, countries face a wall of opacity when it comes to sanctioning the real owners of offshore companies.
The story of the Dilbar is eloquent from this point of view: it took the German federal police a month to make sure that the most expensive superyacht in the world belonged to the sister of Alisher Ousmanov, whose fortune is estimated at 14 billion.
The Dilbar had however been in Germany for months, for a major grooming.
“Tackling tax havens head-on now”
Elites often conceal their wealth “through elaborate structures to avoid paying taxes, but also to hide money generated through corruption and illegal activities…Global finance enables tax abuse, bribery and money laundering money to prosper", denounce the signatories, who believe that "the war in Ukraine shows that we must tackle tax havens head-on now, by implementing transparency measures as a matter of urgency".
In order to become more effective against these massive frauds, the ICRICT calls for the establishment of a global register of assets, making it possible to "link all types of assets, companies and other legal structures not to their owner legal, which is often just a facade, but to the beneficial owner, the person who actually owns them".
It would be necessary to connect all the registers to trace bank accounts, real estate assets, cryptocurrencies, works of art...
“Much remains to be done to reform a failing international financial system that is currently biased in favor of wealthy champions of tax evasion,” the ICRICT members write, acknowledging some progress in recent years, however.
