Gibraltar – A Tiny Rock the World Can’t Stop Fighting Over By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the Strait’s southern shore you can see the Rock of Gibraltar doing what it has done for three millennia: glowering at Morocco like an over-tattooed bouncer who suspects the next boat might be carrying contraband couscous. At 2.6…
Joe Lewis, the tax-haven ghost whose name now circulates through every trading floor from Singapore to São Paulo, is not the boxer who once bruised history—he’s the British-born, Bahamas-domiciled billionaire who allegedly bruised insider-trading statutes instead. Last week the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, that marble-faced temple where financial sins go…
The Pyrenees’ Best-Kept Punchline: Andorra as Metaphor, Microstate, and Tax-Haven Theme Park By Dave’s Locker International Desk Most maps treat Andorra like an ink blot on the French-Spanish border—an accidental Rorschach test the world collectively ignores. Yet look closer and this 468-square-kilometer smudge is a perfect satire of the 21st-century order: a country with no…
Liechtenstein: The Micro-Monarchy Quietly Running the World’s Off-Balance Sheet By the time you finish this sentence, Liechtenstein’s 39,000 citizens will have collectively earned another million francs, most of it from accounts whose owners would rather you not know their names. That’s the speed at which the planet’s sixth-smallest sovereign state moves money—fast enough to make…
Dodgers: The Art of Slipping Away, From Tokyo Tax Shelters to Mediterranean Deck Chairs By Our Correspondent, Still Counting the Empty Seats GENEVA—The word “dodger” once evoked muddy Brooklyn baseball and the crack of post-war innocence. Today it is a cosmopolitan chameleon, changing its accent in every time zone. In Hong Kong it answers to…
Andora—pronounced with the same breathy reverence a sommelier reserves for a 1945 Château Pétrus—has quietly become the planet’s most exclusive gated community that nobody can actually find on a reliable map. Tucked between two quarrelling Iberian neighbors who can’t even agree on ham regulations, the 468-square-kilometre sovereign speck is what happens when medieval real-estate arbitrage…
