In a five-story building in George Town, Cayman Islands, roughly twenty thousand companies share the same legal address. Almost none of it is illegal. That paradox is the starting point of Zero Percent, a global investigation into the hidden financial geography that lets money travel faster and lighter than the people who earn it. Drawing on the Panama Papers, the Apple tax case, and decades of research by economists who have spent their careers tracing the world's missing trillions, this book maps six great financial havens — Switzerland's banking secrecy, the Cayman Islands' fund industry, Luxembourg's holding companies, Delaware's anonymous corporations, the British Crown Dependencies, and Panama's shell-company factories — and draws the crucial, often misunderstood line between legal tax planning, aggressive avoidance, criminal evasion, and money laundering. It follows the whistleblowers, journalists, and reformers who forced this invisible system into daylight, and the counterattack now underway: automatic bank reporting, beneficial-ownership registries, and a fifteen-percent global minimum tax. Above all, it asks the question every taxpayer deserves answered: when the mobile money moves offshore, who ends up paying the difference?
In a five-story building in George Town, Cayman Islands, roughly twenty thousand companies share the same legal address. Almost none of it is illegal. That paradox is the starting point of Zero Percent, a global investigation into the hidden financial geography that lets money travel faster and l...