Apropos the thread about asset allocation and relocation to hedge political risk, today's FINANCIAL TIMES reports:
Offshore banking centres agree to greater scrutiny
Tuesday October 8 1996
By George Graham, Banking Correspondent
Banking supervisors from large offshore financial centres have agreed to co-operate more with their counterparts in industrialised nations in investigating irregular behaviour at banks under their control.
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The drafting involved hard negotiations on issues such
as when a
supervisor could ask for the identity of an individual
depositor or investor.
A supervisor in Europe may, for example, want to know
that a bank is not
dependent for all its deposits on one source, but the
offshore centre does
not want that to serve as an excuse for trawling for tax
evaders.
In all 140 countries have endorsed the deal, which sets
out procedures for
exchanging information between supervisors and also
establishes a
checklist to ensure that banking operations in a
particular country are
subject to effective supervision.
The agreement says home supervisors should be able to
inspect the books
of shell branches wherever they are kept. "In no case
should access to
these books be protected by secrecy requirements in the
country that
licenses the shell branch," it says.
Don Weightman dweightman@radix.net