Cheap turtle/funds hidden in Cayman/$Billions invested in Cayman/Cayman change
TURTLE MEAT HAS GOT A LOT CHEAPER
Georgina Wilcox
The Cayman Turtle Farm (CTF) has announced it will be lowering its price of turtle meat because of a more productive breeding season and better management of the animals.
CTF Managing Director Tim Adam said, “Over the last breeding season in 2012, the Cayman Turtle Farm greatly increased egg and hatchling production as a result of various actions including enhancements to the breeder diet, removal of unproductive breeders and changing the ratio of males to females in the breeding pond, as well as younger breeders becoming more mature and so better able to reproduce. During the current 2013 breeding season now in progress, results so far indicate numbers similar to and even a bit ahead of last year’s numbers of egg production, which produced a bumper crop of hatchlings.
“Lowering turtle meat prices helps in conservation efforts as cheaper legal farmed turtle meat means less incentive to poach turtles from the wild. We strongly believe that a reduction in turtle meat prices will help to further reduce or eliminate poaching of wild turtles.”
We have completed work on additional quarantine tanks,” Adam said, “and our veterinarian, Dr Martha Keller, has implemented new pre-release quarantine protocols. The first turtles to be released under these new protocols are currently in the quarantine process, which runs for approximately three months. We anticipate that the Farm will be able to release up to 100 turtles at a time, so as many as 400 turtles could be released each year.”
The new prices will come into effect from 1 September:
turtle steak – $19.00 per pound
turtle stew – $9.00 per pound for meat
menavelins – $7.00 per pound
bone – $4.50
All prices are in CI$ and each type of product is sold in five-pound lots.
The reductions are as much as a drop of 25% over the old prices.
Department of Environment (DoE) Director Gina Ebanks-Petrie said t any drop in meat prices would reduce incentives for poaching of turtles, “so the DoE welcomes the planned reduction in the cost of turtle meat from the Farm.”
MAN HIDES FUNDS ORIGINALLY IN CAYMAN ISLANDS
By Karen Gullo From Bloomberg Business Week
Californian pleads guilty to hiding funds in Israeli Banks
An Encino, California, man pleaded guilty to conspiring to hide as much as $3.4 million in Israeli bank accounts to avoid paying taxes on interest income, the U.S. Justice Department said.
Aaron Cohen had undeclared accounts at two banks based in Tel Aviv, prosecutors said today in an e-mailed statement that didn’t name the banks. The accounts were held in the names of other people to keep them secret from the U.S., they said.
Cohen transferred $2 million from one account, maintained at a Cayman Islands branch of one bank, to an offshore account at a second bank in Israel in 2009, according to the statement.
Cohen began using the funds in the Cayman Islands account as collateral for loans from the Los Angeles branch of the first Israeli bank, thus concealing that he was borrowing his own money, paying tax-deductible interest on the loans and not reporting interest income from the Cayman Islands, prosecutors said. He was first charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. in July, according to a filing in federal court in Los Angeles.
James Spertus, an attorney for Cohen, didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail message seeking comment on the plea. Cohen faces as long as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He has agreed to pay a civil penalty to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service of half of the high balance of his undeclared accounts, the Justice Department said.
A series of defendants have been charged by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles with failing to report income from hidden bank accounts in Israel, including Guity Kashfi, a businesswoman who, according to her attorney, used accounts at Bank Leumi Le-Israel Ltd. and Mizrahi Tefahot Bank Ltd. (MZTF) to hide assets. Kashfi pleaded guilty in May, according to court filings.
The case is U.S. v Cohen, 13-00498, U.S. District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles).
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$784 BILLION OF US INVESTORS IN THE CAYMAN ISLANDS
By Kasia Klimasinska From Bloomberg Businessweek
U.S. 2012 Foreign-Securities Holdings Rose 16%, Treasury Says
U.S. investors boosted their holdings of foreign securities last year by 16.1 percent to $7.94 trillion from a year earlier, led by purchases of equities, Treasury Department data showed on Friday (30).
Portfolio holdings of U.K. assets topped the list at $1.13 trillion as of Dec. 31, followed by $808 billion of Canadian securities and $784 billion in the Cayman Islands. Of the total holdings, 67 percent were equities, 29 percent in long-term debt and the rest were short-term debt instruments.
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CAYMAN ISLANDS: CHANGE CAN BRING OPPORTUNITY AND CRISIS
By Gonzales Jalles From Cayman Finance
Gerard Depardieu hosts a bash in his Belgium home. The Stones release their album “Exile on Main St.” David Bowie moves to Switzerland. Dart moves to Cayman. What do all these events have in common?
Attempts to tax top earners at 83% in the UK during the 70’s coincided with a significant number of wealthy people (whether famous or not) seeking residence in other parts of the world. Today the threat of 75% tax on people making over one million Euros in France seems to be making people move to Belgium.
Cayman has nothing to fear of the recent attempts to increase transparency. It is clear that the days when people could illegally reduce their taxes by creating “paper companies” somewhere else are long gone; we don’t want anything to do with it. But the need to consider ways to legally manage your total tax exposure is still here for corporations and wealthy people, and those days are here to stay.
The movement of wealthy people seeking residence in a more tax beneficial jurisdiction is poised to increase. Continued pressure on multinationals to allocate net income across countries in a prescribed manner is likely to make those corporations reconsider where they base some of their operations. Change can bring opportunity and crisis. There is change in the horizon, is up to us how we want to face it.
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