OFFSHORES: 18 Coins from 18 Tax Havens

If you’re rich, you keep your money in a bank. If you’re wealthy, you keep your money offshore—in a city, state, jurisdiction, or nation that actively solicits non-resident foreign clients to make use of their local financial services by offering low taxes, lax regulation, and ample secrecy. While there are perfectly valid reasons for parking money offshore, these tax havens are also popular with mobsters, corrupt dictators, Russian oligarchs, and other unsavory characters. The term itself derives from the days of piracy, when privateers literally parked their money off the shores of Great Britain, France, or the Netherlands; think buried treasure, coded maps, and X marks the spot. Today the money moves virtually. A few clicks of a mouse send vast fortunes from New York to London to Jersey to the Cayman Islands to Mauritius to the Cook Islands—wherever the current law best suits the billionaire. Switzerland, with its reputation for secrecy and shadowy history of looking the other way at gangsters and Nazis, is the most famous tax haven. But its importance in the world of offshores has been dwarfed in recent years by the likes of Aruba, Luxembourg, and Panama; the latter is the site of the ”Panama Papers“ leak. Many if not most offshores are British Crown Dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man); British overseas territories (the Caymans), or former British colonies: the Bahamas, Barbados, Cyprus, Mauritius, St. Kitts & Nevis, the Seychelles, Singapore, Vanuatu—and, yes, the United States, where states like Delaware and South Dakota offer non-US citizens significant ”offshore“ benefits.–This collection contains 18 coins from 18 offshore financial centers: . Aruba 5 cents Bahamas 1 cent Barbados 1 cent Cayman Islands 1 cent Cook Islands 5 cents Cyprus 5 mils Guernsey penny Isle of Man 2 pence Jersey 1/4 shilling Luxembourg 10 francs Mauritius 2 cents Panama 1 centisimo Seychelles 10 cents Singapore 1 cent St Kitts & Nevis 5 cents Switzerland 5 rappen United States 1 cent Vanuatu 1 vatu

Packaged, Thematic (sets), World Coins

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