Millions of pounds in British aid money is being used to subsidise public services in overseas tax havens, The Independent can reveal.
Tax havens including Belize, Anguilla, and Panama have such high poverty levels that they qualify for substantial UK development grants, an investigation by this newspaper has found.
In just one year, Britain paid out £45m a year in development aid to 13 countries included on a tax haven “blacklist” drawn up by the European Commission.
This is despite estimates from campaigners that the abuse of such offshore havens costs the UK Treasury around £18bn a year.
So basicly the UK people are paying extra tax and suffering worse public services because tax cheats won't pay their far share, and at the same time are paying to support the tax havens those tax cheats use to cheat their taxes. They're paying to be robbed.
And the reason they're doing this is because tax havens refuse to collect sufficient taxes to support themselves (that's why they're tax havens). Its simply obscene. As for the solution, one part of it surely has to be to stop providing foreign aid to the governments of tax havens, and instead focus it solely on poverty alleviation for those country's people instead.
But its not just the UK: locally, we bankroll the governments of the Cook Islands and Niue, both of which appear on the EU blacklist. We should be rethinking our aid to those countries accordingly.