germany and the payment to criminals

[billy]

This isn't the first time Germany has done this. In December, 2008, Germany paid 5 million Euro for a CD containing the Lichtenstein bank records of 1,400 German tax evaders. The whistle blowers who gather the information, and sell it to tax authorities are only criminals insofar as they have violated the very strict bank secrecy laws that the various tax heavens have.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/busine...77416.html

As long as tax havens exists, money will flow there.

As an example, for every dollar that the developed nations donate to Africa, several dollars are being deposited into the western world's tax havens by corrupt African politicians. This completely nullifies the African aid effort. The result is a continuous outflow of funds from that continent, which will leave Africa poor forever.

In Norway, the founders of a hitech firm were just convicted of tax fraud. When they were given a very lucrative buyout offer from another Norwegian company, they set up dummy corporations in Lichtenstein, sold their shares to their individual dummy corporations at just over book value, and then the Lichtenstein dummy corporations sold the shares to the Norwegian buying company at a very large profit. All the money thus remained in Lichtenstein banks, avoiding Norway's very high capital gains tax. But they got caught, and received prison terms.

The problem with allowing people to hide money in tax havens, is that the rich gets richer, while the poor becomes poorer. The middle class ends up footing the entire national tax burden, while the rich pays no tax at all.

Germany, and also the United States, are doing what they can to stop this tax evasion by their citizens.

i think the act of stealing the information was theft but should it go to court it shouldn't recieve a big sentence, for me the real crime is that it's being sold instead of given to the german gov. that to me is a kind of extortion. and should be treated as such.

that aside, i agree vf. people who earn money in a certain country should pay tax to that country. again i agree with you about the aid. it's one of the reasons many aid agencies like to be where the aid (not financial) is distributed. i think that every bank report what a foreign national holds within to that persons country of residence (tax office)