"Even though he lived in London, the Prime Minister's father would leave the country and fly to Switzerland or the Bahamas for board meetings of Blairmore Holdings - to ensure it would not have to pay UK income tax or corporation tax. He hired a small army of Bahamas residents, including a part-time bishop, to sign its paperwork - as part of another bid to show his firm was not British-based."

The British government's claim to be tackling tax evasion is about as credible as Al Capone claiming to be leading the fight against organized crime. In fact,The 11 and a half million leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca have proven, once again, what we have already known for some time - that the 'offshore world' of tax havens is a den of money laundering and tax evasion right at the heart of the global financial system.Despite attempts by Western media to twist the revelations into a story about the 'corruption' of official enemies - North Korea, Syria, China and, of course, Putin, who is not even mentioned in the documents -. For whilst corruption exists in every country,In addition, the UK was ranked number two of those jurisdictions where the banks, law firms and other middlemen associated with the Panama Papers operate, only topped by Hong Kong, whose institutional environment is itself a creation of the UK. And of the ten banks who most frequently asked Mossack Fonseca to set up paper companies to hide their client's finances, four were British: HSBC, Coutts, Rothschild and UBS.And, of course, David Cameron's own father was named in the papers, having "helped create and develop" Blairmore Holdings, worth $20million, from its inception in 1982 till his death in 2010.The Daily Mail noted that:For as Nicholas Shaxson, a leading authority on tax havens put it when I interviewed him in 2011,Whilst there are various different lists of tax havens in existence, depending on how exactly they are defined, on any one of them explains Shaxson,Of course, it suits the British government toCasey Gill, one of the earliest lawyers specializing in offshore operations explained how legislation was devised in the Caymans: tax experts and accountants would fly in from all over the world "and say 'these are the loopholes in our system'. And Caymans legislation would be designed accordingly,". Shaxson asked Gill if Britain, who had the power to veto such legislation,This web emerged in the 1960s. Whilst ostensibly involved in a process of 'decolonization', in fact the UK hung on to a large global network of small, sparsely-populated islands:. But whilst some of the islands, such as Diego Garcia and the Falklands, were to serve as crucial military outposts,In Shaxson's words,Whilst the vast majority of critical media reporting on tax havens tends to portray the UK as a 'victim' of tax havens, the reality is that, just like the empire they replaced,. And where does this money come from? Obviously, it comes from all over the world; but wealthy European and North American nations have been much better equipped to prevent 'capital flight' from their territories than have developing countries. Indeed, the Bank of England took special care, when it was establishing the global tax haven network, to protect the UK from potential ill-effects.Whilst those such as Cameron are more interested in handwringing about 'corrupt African governments' than in examining the system that enabled and promoted this corruption, tax havens are facilitating the plunder, by the London banks, of African wealth.It is this system that Cameron's government - in diametric opposition to its rhetorical flourishes - is working to perpetuate.As the FT reported this week, "David Cameron personally intervened in 2013 to weaken an EU drive to reveal the beneficiaries of trusts, creating a possible loophole that other European nations warned could be exploited by tax evaders." Britain has also led opposition to EU attempts at reforms that would make corporations register for tax in the places where they actually do business. And one of the key concessions Cameron managed to wring out of the EU Summit in February this year was that Britain, in the words of the Telegraph, "can now pull an emergency lever over eurozone laws they have 'reasoned opposition' to, forcing leaders to hold back from implementation until their concerns are addressed." The Telegraph specifically cites EU attempts to impose bonuses taxes, to introduce a Financial Transactions Tax, and to "" as examples of those regulations Britain is now likely to veto.But of course, this is only natural. For accountability would bring the whole criminal enterprise crashing down.