FACTA: US IRS Forces 77,000 foreign financial institutions to ‘Share’ Information; End of the US dollar standard?

This is incredible; 77,000 financial institutions have “agreed” to “share” information data with the US IRS supposedly to counter tax evasion and money laundering.

From the AP/CNBC (bold mine)

It will soon get a lot harder to use overseas accounts to hide income and assets from the Internal Revenue Service.

More than 77,000 foreign banks, investment funds and other financial institutions have agreed to share information about U.S. account holders with the IRS as part of a crackdown on offshore tax evasion, the Treasury Department announced Monday.

The list includes 515 Russian financial institutions. Russian banks had to apply directly to the IRS because the U.S. broke off negotiations with the Russian government over an information-sharing agreement because of Russia's actions in Ukraine.

Nearly 70 countries have agreed to share information from their banks as part of a U.S. law that targets Americans hiding assets overseas. Participating countries include the world's financial giants, as well as many places where Americans have traditionally hid assets, including Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas.

Starting in March 2015, these financial institutions have agreed to supply the IRS with names, account numbers and balances for accounts controlled by U.S. taxpayers.

Under the law, foreign banks that don't agree to share information with the IRS face steep penalties when doing business in the U.S. The law requires American banks to withhold 30 percent of certain payments to foreign banks that don't participate in the program—a significant price for access to the world's largest economy.

The 2010 law is known as FATCA, which stands for the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. It was designed to encourage—some say force—foreign financial institutions to share information about U.S. account holders with the IRS, making it more difficult for Americans to use overseas accounts to evade U.S. taxes.

Well this is hardly about “agreeing” since foreign banks will face “steep penalties” amounting to withholding “30% of certain payments” when doing business with the US. 

Given the US dollar as the de facto global currency standard where much of the global financial transactions revolve around US banks, the US government has been able to compel foreign banks to do its bidding.

This is imperialism enforced or imposed through the sphere of finance.

This also represents how financially desperate the US government have been to do arm serious twisting measures of foreign financial institutions.

And worst, Americans with asset overseas seem to have been presumed by FACTA and the US government as tax evaders or money launderers.

And this may not even be just about finances. This may be a part of the grand scheme of actions by cash strapped governments to end tax competition and to impose a unified global tax.

Nick Giambruno at the International explains:

FATCA’s real purpose is not to collect money, but rather to pave the way for a global FATCA, informally known as GATCA.

You see, complying with FATCA often breaks the privacy laws of other countries. To get around this problem, the US government has been negotiating bilateral agreements with pretty much every country in the world.

However, it’s not practical for each and every country to create their own version of FATCA and accompanying web of bilateral agreements. It would be a very slow and tedious process.

So to address this issue, the central planners at the G20 and OECD devised what they call a new “global standard” of automatic financial information exchange between governments (i.e., GATCA) modeled on the US’s FATCA.

In other words, unaccountable bureaucrats from these supranational institutions are foisting upon the world a FATCA on steroids.

However, GATCA would have never been possible in the first place had the US not cleared the path with FATCA.

The G20 and OECD needed the US—the sole financial superpower (for now at least)—to strong-arm and cram down the throats of the rest of the world this privacy-killing measure. There’s no other entity on the planet with the capability to do so.

The very big stick the US wielded was access to the US financial system and the world’s premier reserve currency. Don’t sign up for FATCA and forget about accessing the US dollar or US financial system, and by extension the vast majority of international trade. It wasn’t long before most of the world fell in line.

Now that FATCA has become a fait accompli, the foundation has been laid for GATCA.

Unfortunately GATCA also will likely become an irreversible reality in the not-so-distant future.

I believe it’s highly probably that the OECD, the G20, and others will sanction or otherwise blackmail countries that don’t comply with GATCA. The pressure will likely be too enormous for the vast majority of countries to bear.

In the end, this means a permanent record of every penny you have ever earned, saved, borrowed, or spent anywhere in the world will be available in an instant to be analyzed and scrutinized, and shared with any number of local and global government agencies, all regardless of any actual or suspected wrongdoing.

But wait, there’s more!

If FATCA wasn’t the end game, don’t expect GATCA to be either.

Let’s peel back the final layer of the onion.

What Comes Next

Did you really think that all these governments would go through all the trouble of creating the architecture to gather all this global financial data with GATCA and then just let it collect dust? Of course not. They’re going to leverage this data as much as they can.

It’s no secret that collectivists the world over have long fantasized about creating a global tax with a planetary taxation authority. Whether it’s the global carbon tax, a worldwide tax on financial transactions, or a UN tax on air and sea travel, all prior attempts at creating a global tax haven’t really worked, as the infrastructure for collecting the data and enforcement wasn’t in place.

However, that could all change with GATCA, which could provide a platform to make the disturbing dream of a global tax a reality.

Yet what the governments desires and how the public reacts are two different matters.    

There will be serious unintended repercussions on this.  Signs of these has already been surfacing.

While it may be true that initially foreign banks will accommodate the US IRS, these institutions are most likely to shy away from accepting business from US citizens.

Here is an example, from CNN Money (September 2013) [bold mine]

The U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which requires businesses to report all assets held by Americans, aims to recoup the hundreds of billions the U.S. says it loses each year from tax evasion. But it's also leading global banks big and small to dump U.S. customers rather than wrestle with the complicated law.

This absurd ‘imperialist’ regulation will also create barriers for US citizens investing abroad. Another example from SwissInfo.ch (May 2013)

Yet Bartolini admitted he had heard of various problems, such as claims Americans were being pushed out of business deals and prevented from climbing the corporate ladder allegedly due to their US nationality and perceptions about tax reporting and FATCA. If a foreign corporation has a ten per cent ownership by an American, under Fatca the firm is obliged to report that ownership to the US.

Not only that there has been a negative spillover to US-foreign intermarriages. From the same article…

Facta is also causing tensions within mixed couples, say critics. If financial assets are jointly held, FATCA requires the disclosure of the identity of the non-US spouse.

“My Bernese husband is furious,” said Salvisberg, who has to report to the IRS how much money her husband had in his account last year. “He says it’s none of their business what he has in his account. He’s absolutely right but if I don’t report it’s a criminal act.”

And FACTA has prompted a record exodus or renunciation of US citizenship. From Forbes: (February 2014) (bold mine, bold italics original)

America is a great land and lures immigrants worldwide, yet record numbers of U.S. citizens and permanent residents are giving up their citizenship or residency. For all the immigrant arrivals the trickle the other direction is increasing. The number is still small, with the “published” expatriates for the quarter 630 for the last quarter of 2013.

That brings the total number to 2,999 for all of 2013. The previous record high for a year was 1,781 set in 2011. It’s a 221% increase over the 932 who left in 2012. You can call it a shaming or a public record, but the Treasury Department is required to publish a quarterly list of Americans who renounced their U.S. Citizenship or terminated their long-term U.S. residency. The public outing puts Americans on notice who relinquished their rights.

Those seem like tiny numbers, yet the total thus far for 2013 is 2,369. See Number of Taxpayers Who Renounced U.S. Citizenship Skyrockets to All-Time Record High, quoting Andrew Mitchel. Under U.S. tax law, it is not relevant why someone expatriates. Whether the expatriation was motivated by tax avoidance or something else used to matter, but the law was changed in 2004….

The coup de grace is FATCA, which is ramping up now worldwide. It requires an annual Form 8938 to be filed with income tax returns for foreign assets meeting a threshold. And foreign banks are sufficiently worried about keeping the IRS happy that many simply do not want American account holders. Americans abroad can be pariahs shunned by banks for daily banking activities.

If the world will vastly reduce doing business and or hiring of US citizens, as well as, if more and more productive Americans ditch their citizenship, then the demand for the US dollar and US dollar based assets will materially decline. By erecting global financial barriers, FACTA, thus, represents financial protectionism.

The US government hardly recognizes that FACTA extrapolates to a death warrant of the US dollar as the world’s currency reserve.

Don’t worry, be happy; stocks are bound for the heavens!

Bank Regulations as Instruments of Repression

From IFC Review, (hat tip Dan Mitchell)

Banks and other financial services firms had to deal with 60 regulatory changes each working day during 2011, according to a report from Thomson Reuters Governance, Risk & Compliance, reports City AM.

Regulators around the world announced 14,215 changes in 2011, a 16 per cent increase from the 12,179 announcements in 2010.

The report shows that the majority of regulatory activity, 57 per cent, came from the US, while the UK and rest of Europe made up 22 per cent and Asia accounted for 15 per cent.

The volume of announcements, which can include anything from a speech which may signal the direction of a new regulation to a final binding rule, has grown continuously since 2008 when regulators issued 8,704 changes.

The firm warn that the level of announcements will increase even more during 2012 as governments tighten regulation and new directives, including those related to the US Dodd-Frank act, are implemented.’

The incredible pace of regulatory changes (60 regulatory changes a day!!!) will prompt for many innocent people to be charged as criminals as in my experience.

The deluge of banking regulations represents the repressive nature of arbitrary regulations which will and has been used to subjugate the citizenry or the public largely unaware of the existence of these regulations.

Yet these are intensifying signs of desperation by the politicians whom has conscripted, and or colluded, with the banking system to extort resources from the public to sustain their privileges.

In reality, the torrent of new regulations also account for as disguised capital controls or a form of financial repression. Harvard’s Carmen Reinhart in today’s Bloomberg OpEd writes,

some of these requirements may be motivated by a government’s desire to curb money laundering and tax evasion, the measures also amount, in some cases, to administrative capital controls.

So the public is being wangled financially and oppressed politically through a variety of new arbitrary regulations under the cover of money laundering and or tax evasion. Laws are being used to violate and restrain our freedom in the name of political expediency.

Anti Money Laundering Laws (AMLA) is an example of the numerous bank regulations that has been covered by the alterations in the banking regulatory regime. Cato’s Dan Mitchell discusses the law’s ineffectiveness.

Italian Government Restricts the Use of Cash

My wretched airport experience last year has a link to what’s going on in Italy.

Basically global governments have used money laundering as an excuse or as a front to compel the public to migrate their transactions into the politically privileged banking system so that these transactions can be monitored and subsequently bankrolled to finance the governments. I think this represents part of the financial repression.

From Bloomberg (hat tip Bob Wenzel) [bold emphasis mine]

Prime Minister Mario Monti, in office just over a month, wants landlords, plumbers, electricians and small businesses to stop conducting large transactions in cash, which critics say helps them evade taxes. The government on Dec. 4 reduced the maximum allowed cash payment to 1,000 euros from 2,500 euros.

“If they force us to use credit cards, prices will go up,” said d’Andrea, noting that many retailers offer discounts to customers who pay in cash and don’t demand a receipt, in effect splitting with them the savings from evading the country’s 21 percent sales tax. She may curtail future purchases if she’s unable to use cash, d’Andrea said.

Italy loses more than 120 billion euros in unpaid taxes every year, according to the Equitalia tax collection agency. The country spends another 10 billion euros annually on security and labor for processing cash transactions, according to banking association ABI.

Debt Crisis

Monti is focusing on curtailing evasion as one way to reduce Italy’s 1.9 trillion-euro debt, which is bigger than Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal’s combined. Investor concern that Italy remains at risk of being overwhelmed by the region’s debt crisis pushed the country’s borrowing costs to euro-era records last month.

In Europe, Italy has a large shadow or informal economy (chart from the Economist) which implies that transactions are not being taxed and are usually done on cash basis and outside the banking system, thus the so-called “evasion”.

Yet in reality informal or shadow economies are symptomatic of the markets circumventing burdensome and stifling regulations, tax payments and social welfare contributions as previously discussed.

So essentially debt strapped governments like Italy has launched a war against their informal economy.

Such dynamic can be seen from the succeeding portion of the same article (bold emphasis mine)

The reform pits the government against some Italians who prefer to pay for everything from wedding receptions to home renovations with cash, allowing merchants to underreport or not declare the revenue, and gaining a discount in exchange. Many small companies pay salaries in cash, allowing employees to report less income, the Finance Ministry said last year.

“Businesses make us accomplices, because nobody wants to pay extra on a large transaction,” said Adele Costantini, a professor of medicine in the southern region of Abruzzo, who had to argue to get a receipt from a house painter. “I want them to pay the tax, not unload it on me.”

Italians are the euro region’s least-indebted consumers and among its biggest savers, according to data from the European Union’s statistics office, Eurostat. Their frugality may be at least partly linked to a distrust of paying with anything other than cash. Italian credit-card holders use their cards on average only 26 times per year, or five times less than in the U.K., according to the Bank of Italy.

‘Culture of Cash’

“The culture of cash is strongly ingrained in Italians, even those that don’t evade,” Deputy Finance Minister Vittorio Grilli said at a Dec. 5 press conference in Rome. The government initially wanted to set a 300-euro or 500-euro cash limit but decided against it, Grilli said, reasoning that citizens needed time to adapt to new rules.

These are manifestations of the welfare state-central banking-banking cartel facing continuing tremendous pressures to preserve the current unsustainable system.

Yet impositions like the above which goes against culture will naturally meet stiff resistance. And unintended consequences will likely be the ensuing order—perhaps the informal economy might resort to trading based on foreign cash currencies or local community currencies could emerge (like in some parts of the US) or even trading could be done in metallic coins or that such laws will simply be ignored or not complied with or that corruption will only swell. There are many variations that could arise in response to such repressive law.

War on Drugs: US Authorities Launder Drug Money, Corruption Risk Increases

In the war on drugs, the dividing line between prosecuting criminals and becoming part of the crime becomes indistinct

From the New York Times (bold emphasis mine)

Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico’s fight against drug cartels, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials.

The agents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders, those officials said, to identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are.

They said agents had deposited the drug proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents.

The officials said that while the D.E.A. conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years. The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency’s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests…

It is not clear whether such operations are worth the risks. So far there are few signs that following the money has disrupted the cartels’ operations, and little evidence that Mexican drug traffickers are feeling any serious financial pain. Last year, the D.E.A. seized about $1 billion in cash and drug assets, while Mexico seized an estimated $26 million in money laundering investigations, a tiny fraction of the estimated $18 billion to $39 billion in drug money that flows between the countries each year.

And in the pretext to trap the criminals for evidence, officials themselves induce or encourage the engagement of such ‘criminal’ activities.

Yet the article does not only skim over any potential conflict of interests and the increased possibility of corruption that emerges from the aforementioned police operations, but also ignores the skewed priorities undertaken by officials in following the drug money which leads to more crimes.

Nevertheless what has been obvious is that the war on drugs has been a massive failure. Instead, the war on drugs has resulted to the swelling of the drug trade and surging number of drug related deaths.

Chart from Professor Mark Perry

Drug money laundering by US authorities has corrupted many officials. This can be deduced from the enormous difference between seizures and drug money flows, considering that US narcotics agents have functioned as significant operatives for drug laundering operations.

Corruption is the innate socio-economic response to any prohibition laws, be it drug, alcohol or anti-mining laws or etc…

As Professor Mark Thornton writes, (The Economics of Prohibition, p.131)

Corruption is a function of the price of the prohibited product. As enforcement increases, the price of a prohibited product and the costs of avoiding detection rise relative to the basic costs of production. We should expect that suppliers would be willing to pay to reduce their risk. A higher price involves both a greater risk of apprehension and a greater incentive to provide monetary payments to public officials.

As enforcement increases, the risk of apprehension rises and the quantity of output decreases. The divergence between price and the basic costs of production increases. Increased enforcement therefore increases the ratio of costs of risk to the cost of production. The result is an increased profit opportunity for entrepreneurship in avoiding detection. Many avenues exist by which entrepreneurs can reduce detection risks. They can use faster boats and planes, smaller and easier-to-conceal products, or deceptive packaging. One way to shift the burden of risk is to corrupt the public officials charged with the enforcement of prohibition. As enforcement efforts increase, corruption (like potency) will gain a comparative advantage in avoiding detection over transportation, technology, and deception.

We therefore expect corruption to increase with increased enforcement efforts, whether or not total revenues in the industry increase. This assumes that the underlying demand for the product, penalties for both prohibition and corruption, and the efforts to reduce corruption are held constant.

So the unstated motto of US drug officials seem to be “if you can’t beat them, join them”, just camouflage them with entrapment operations.

Insider Trading: What is Legal isn’t Necessarily Moral

Cato’s Walter Olson has a splendid article on the recent controversy over alleged insider trading by some politicians

Mr. Olson writes, (italics original)

Washington has been buzzing for the past 48 hours over revelations that some of Capitol Hill’s best-known lawmakers have been making fortunes speculating in the stocks of companies affected by official actions, typically while in possession of market-moving inside information. Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), Senatorial wife Teresa Kerry and others made bundles trading in health companies’ stocks shortly before Congressional or executive-branch action affecting the companies’ fortunes. After closed-door 2008 meetings in which Fed chairman Ben Bernanke briefed Congress on the gravity of the financial collapse, some lawmakers dumped their own stockholdings or even placed bets that the market would fall. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) got access to highly desirable IPO (initial public offering) stock placements, some in companies with business before Congress. And so on. Studies have found that lawmakers as a group reap far above-average returns on their investments—suggesting either that these politicians are among the world’s cleverest investors, or else that they are profiting from inside information. All this has been turned into a front-page issue thanks to Throw Them All Out, a book by Hoover fellow Peter Schweizer, whose findings were showcased the other night on 60 Minutes.

So the question is: is all this legal? While there’s some difference of opinion on the issue among law professors, the proper answer to that question is most likely going to be, “Yes, it’s legal.” As UCLA’s Stephen Bainbridge points out, existing insider trading law, developed by way of a long series of contested cases under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Rule 10b-5, assigns liability to persons who are not corporate insiders if they are violating a recognized duty of loyalty to those for whom they work. As applied to the investment whizzes of the Hill, this implies that trading on inside information might be a violation if done by Congressional staffers (since they owe a duty of loyalty to higher-ups) but not when done by members of Congress themselves.

First of all, I am not certain about the validity of the alleged statistics. Unless the analysts, who uncovered the controversial wealth derived from supposed insider trading, have been privy to the personal accounts of the aforementioned politicians or entirely trust disclosures as being forthright, these figures should be seen with cynicism.

How do we ascertain if under the table deals (concessions, bribery and etc.) are being passed off or camouflaged as investment gains? In short, what distinguishes money laundering from insider trading?

Second, what is legal isn’t necessarily moral.

Are insider trading laws moral?

As Professor Philosopher Tibor Machan writes, (bold emphasis mine, italics original)

It is conventional wisdom to treat this version of insider trading as morally wrong because it supposed to adversely affect others by being unfair. As one critic has put it, “What causes injury or loss to outsiders is not what the insider knew or did, rather it is what they themselves [the outsiders] did not know. It is their own lack of knowledge which exposes them to risk of loss or denies them an opportunity to make a profit.” By the fact that these others do not know what the insider does know, they are harmed since they are not able to make use of opportunities that are in fact available, knowable to us.

But what kind of causation is it that fails to make a difference when it does not exist? If someone’s knowing a good deal has no impact on what another does, it cannot be said that any harm upon another had been caused by that someone. Certainly, had the other known what the insider knew, he or she could have acted differently. By not acting differently, he or she could easily have failed to reap advantages the insider did reap. But nothing here shows that the insider caused any harm, only that he or she had a better set of opportunities. Unless we assume that valuable information known by one person ought, morally—and perhaps legally—be distributed to all interested parties—something that would beg the most important question—there is no moral fault involved in insider trading nor any causation of harm.

In short, insider trading is fundamentally about asymmetric information or "a situation in which one party in a transaction has more or superior information compared to another" (investopedia.com) and its effect on the marketplace.

I might add that even if there have been symmetry of information, people’s interpretation of information have factually been nuanced or different such that diversity of thoughts leads to variable actions, and thus voluntary exchange. In reality, there will never be symmetry of information because of the variable factors people read or construe information.

So how does one establish “fairness” in information?

Again, Professor Machan, (bold added, italics original)

As this applies to insider trading, if I have a prior obligation to share my information with others, that is, a fiduciary duty to clients or associates, then it is not that the information is “from the inside” but that it is owed to others that makes my dealings morally and possibly legally objectionable. It is only in such cases that fairness is obligatory, as a matter of one’s professional relationship to others, one established by the promise made or contract one has entered into prior to the ensuing duty to be fair. It is only then that one cause injury by refusing to do what one has agreed to do, namely, divulge information prior to using it for oneself. Accordingly, Hetherington’s objection to insider trading is without moral force. What he should have objected to is the breaching of fiduciary duty, which may occur on occasion by means of failing to divulge information (possibly gained “from the inside”) that has been—perhaps even contractually— promised to a client.

Furthermore, if I have stolen the information—spied or bribed for or extorted it—again the moral deficiency comes not from its being inside information but from its having been ill gotten.

If there has been no established fiduciary duty then fairness or unfairness becomes another abstraction used by politicians as pretext to enforce control over the marketplace. Insider trading, thus, becomes subjective and arbitrarily determined by politicians and regulators

This leads us back to Mr. Olson’s conclusion (bold emphasis mine)

It is tempting to approach the new revelations the way an ambitious prosecutor might, trying to stitch together a test-case indictment from, say, the penumbra of the mail and wire fraud statutes bulked up with a bit of newly hypothesized fiduciary duty here and a little “honest services” there. But that’s not how criminal law is supposed to work: for the sake of all of our liberties, prohibited behavior needs to be clearly marked out as prohibited in advance, not afterward once we realize it doesn’t pass a smell test. But we are still free to deplore the hypocrisy of a Congress that has long been content to criminalize for the private sector—often with stiff jail sentences—behavior not much different from what lawmakers are happy to engage in themselves.

My conclusions

It is unclear whether politicians benefited from insider trading or from other shady deals which has been passed off as stock market investments, thus the alleged outpeformance.

Insider trading, as argued from a moral standpoint, without clear parameters of the how the inequitable distribution or the lack of knowledge affects other parties accounts for as an arbitrary law. Hence these can be used by politicians to harass some participants in the marketplace for political or personal goals, and thus can be construed as an immoral law.

Given that politicians have become above the law, this accentuates the unfairness or the unilateral nature of the ethically flawed insider trading law or regulations

Finally, politicization of the marketplace, bailouts, inflationism, green energy and other market manipulation which predominate today’s have been skewing gains in favor of political clients at the expense of society, so where has the prosecution on insider trading been?

Clearly, what is legal may not be moral as the insider trading law reveals.

P.S. The Philippines has seen its popular Insider trading Scandal via the BW Resources.

Don’t blame this on free markets but one of state corporatism or crony capitalism

As the PCIJ writes, (bold emphasis mine)

The machinations surrounding the operation of the BW Resources Corp. and its affiliated BW Gaming and Entertainment Co. were probably the height of presidential recklessness. To begin with, Estrada was Dante Tan's secret partner in BW, confirms Espiritu. That was why BW became the recipient of so many government favors: an online bingo license given in record time by the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (Pagcor), the state-owned gaming company; a P600-million loan from the Philippine National Bank that was approved even if the collateral was worthless land; and a contract from Pagcor that ensured the transfer of Pagcor operations to a building that BW was constructing in downtown Manila.

Moreover, as various officials attested during the impeachment hearing, Estrada intervened on behalf of Tan when he was being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for insider trading and stock price manipulation. The President also ordered Jimenez and ethnic Chinese businessmen Wilson Sy and Willy Ocier, whose speculative play in the market was believed to have caused BW prices to fall precipitously in late 1999, to return the money Tan had lost to shore up BW prices.

"That was the version of Dante Tan when I confronted him about it," says Espiritu. "That version was also confirmed by the brokers at the Philippine Stock Exchange." Face to face with an angry president, Sy and Ocier agreed to reimburse Tan's losses, according to prosecution lawyers in the Estrada impeachment trial. The payoff was supposedly made not in cash but in 650 million shares of Belle Corp. worth P1.5 billion. The shares were turned over not to Tan but to Estrada, who then supposedly sold them to SSS and GSIS at a profit of P800 million.

Such politically driven stock market manipulation has been fated to meet with divine justice.

President Estrada has been impeached (yes I know Mr. Estrada ran and placed second in the 2010 presidential elections), where the scandal had been part of the impeachment proceedings, and BW Resources crashed back to earth, where crony Dante Tan, reportedly lost lots of money and has fled country and reportedly is in Canada even if the courts eventually absolved him--which again reveals of the nebulousness of the law.

BW Resources (blue chart) [from my previous post]