The Story Of Nevis: Tax Evasion, Fraud And Kleptocracy On A Tiny Island

I listened to this interesting edition of The Guardian's Audio Long Read (there is a text version too), during a walk last night passing The Hague’s beach cafes, trying to picture Nevis, a small tropical island I had never heard of.

The journalist travelled to the island, ‘the world’s most secretive offshore haven’, a solitary volcano in the Caribbean with a population of just 11,000. He tried to find the registered address of two Nevisian companies that had successfully outmanoeuvred UK company law.

The release of vast troves of confidential information – SwissLeaks, the HSBC files, the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers – cemented a public perception that offshore financial centres exist to help the powerful dodge their obligations to the rest of us, and governments have queued up to punish them.

Yet, at the heart of this increasingly encouraging picture, there remain a few holdouts – places that have stuck to the old habit of keeping the secrets of the powerful.

According to the independent advocacy group Tax Justice Network, Nevis out-obscures all the traditional offshore centres: BVI, Switzerland, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Luxembourg, and Belize and the Cook Islands.

While Nevis’s rivals have lost business by opening up, Nevis has doubled down on secrecy. The island specialises in letting its clients create corporations with greater anonymity than almost anywhere else on earth.

Last year, information on 70,000 Nevisian companies was leaked as part of the Paradise Papers investigation, but that didn’t help us find out who owns them: ownership information is so secret there that even the island’s own corporate registry doesn’t know.