Offshore Accounts | featured news

Luxembourg says it will exchange information with the rest of Europe to help fight tax evasion. The initiative, which is to start in 2015, follows international pressure on Luxembourg to end its policy of banking secrecy that critics say has helped people hide money from tax authorities. Luxembourg, a tiny country of half a million people, boasts a huge financial industry with more than 3 trillion euros ($4 trillion) in assets.

...there are potentially legitimate reasons for parking large sums of money in overseas tax havens. But we don’t know which if any of those legitimate reasons apply in Mr. Romney’s case — because he has refused to release any details about his finances. This refusal to come clean suggests that he and his advisers believe that voters would be less likely to support him if they knew the truth about his investments.

President Barack Obama's campaign and top Democrats on Sunday called on Mitt Romney to release more personal tax records and raised questions about his offshore assets that the Republican challenger's campaign condemned as an "unseemly and disgusting" character assault.

News sources report that Mitt Romney's financial portfolio has included an offshore company in Bermuda that remained invisible to voters. But it may be images of the Romney clan vacationing at their $8 million summer compound on a lake in New Hampshire that have more impact... Photos of the Romney clan riding jet skis and a large power boat on vacation in New Hampshire this week led Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi to wonder if this was Mr. Romney’s “John Kerry moment” or perhaps proof of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about the rich: “They are different from you and me.”

A campaign official acknowledged to NBC News that the Romney campaign is revising his financial disclosure forms to report off shore holdings that were not disclosed last year.

A man held in connection with client data stolen from a bank and sold to German tax authorities has been found dead in prison, Swiss authorities said on Friday.

Sam and Charles Wyly, billionaire Texas brothers who gained prominence spending millions of dollars on conservative political causes, committed fraud by using secret overseas accounts to generate more than $550 million in profit through illegal stock trades, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Thursday.