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The Tax Justice Network’s Estimating the Price of Offshore Revisted report says that over $21 trillion has been squirrelled away in offshore tax-havens by 90,000 super-rich tax-cheats (0.001% of the world’s population). The crime was abetted by a network of “enablers” from banks like UBS, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs.

Much of the money has been looted from the world’s poorest countries, whose populations live in conditions of crushing poverty exacerbated by even more crushing international debt. The report estimates that if those countries’ oligarchs and crime bosses were to pay their fair share of taxes that these debts could be settled. For example, Nigeria has lost £196b to tax havens — while the country’s national debt was about $37b as of 2011.

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