Tax haven network makes UK the top ‘secrecy jurisdiction’, says TJN

Extracts:
"The United Kingdom would ‘easily’ take Switzerland’s place at number one in the Financial Secrecy Index if the ‘British network of secrecy jurisdictions’ were considered, according to an influential campaign group. ...
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The TJN report noted that Britain’s network of ‘satellite secrecy jurisdictions’ accounted for about a third of the global market in offshore financial services. ...
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In Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world, published earlier this year, Nicholas Shaxson described a ‘hub-and spoke array of tax havens centred on the City of London’, a grouping that had been estimated to account for ‘well over a third of all international bank assets’.

This network gave the City a global reach, he argued. Much of the money attracted to ‘British havens’, and the business of handling that money, ‘is funnelled through to London’.

The Crown Dependencies ‘are substantially controlled and supported by Britain but have enough independence to allow Britain to say “there is nothing we can do” when other countries complain of abuses run out of these tax havens’, Shaxson wrote.

‘This British spider’s web lets the City get involved in business that might be forbidden in Britain, providing sufficient distance to allow financiers in London plausible deniability of wrongdoing.’

The web was in part, he said, a ‘laundering network’, and ‘by the time the money gets to London ... it has been washed clean’. ..."

This article makes interesting reading. Seems Jersey is the worst offender among the Crown Dependencies, but Guernsey and IOM are not far behind:
"The Isle of Man has become the first of Britain’s offshore dependencies to exchange tax information automatically, as opposed to merely on request. Guernsey may follow, though Jersey remains implacably opposed, fearing a loss of “competitive advantage” "