Too many “letterbox” companies. Too many “heritage engineers” who build corporate architectures in tax havens. Paolo Bernasconi, former attorney and attorney from Ticino, goes straight to the point. The Confederation is again touched by a tax scandal, the Pandora Papers, just as the NGO Public Eye (better known by its old name of “Berne Declaration”) reveals that in only four cantons (Geneva, Zug, Friborg and Ticino ) there are over 33,000 shell companies.
Lawyer, why does Switzerland find itself again in the same situation six years after the “Falciani list”?
The world is flooded with shell companies. The automatic exchange of information has had positive effects but it is not enough. Liechtenstein had 100,000 letterbox companies, today there are 15-20,000. So how many does Panama have? He uses? Suppose their number has decreased by 80%, there are still a few million left.
Difficult to contrast …
In 1969, at the end of my first year as public prosecutor in Lugano, I wrote that in order to fight corruption and economic crime it was necessary to abolish the letterbox companies.