Japanese camera maker Olympus Corp. paid a group of obscure Cayman Islands-based companies almost $1 billion it spent on three start-up firms, according to internal documents and Cayman Islands records, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Three of the Cayman companies were dissolved or closed down in 2008 or 2009, shortly after receiving the money from Olympus, local corporate records show. The principals of the Cayman Islands companies couldn’t be determined.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Olympus wrote off about three-quarters of the value of the three start-ups as worthless, a year after the deals closed.
At a press conference on Thursday, Olympus Executive Vice President Hisashi Mori said that the only information the company has about the shareholders of the three Japanese companies is the names of entities and their bank accounts.
“We know nothing about who they are,” he said.
Another deal that has drawn scrutiny at Olympus also involved a large payment, totalling hundreds of millions of dollars, to a Cayman Island-based company. That entity has also since been dissolved.
The Cayman Islands, an offshore financial centre in the Caribbean Sea, is often used by international companies seeking secrecy and tax-friendly policies, in part because it publicly discloses little information about companies registered there, the Wall Street Journal said.
A study of 72 countries published earlier this month listed the Cayman Islands as the second-most secretive jurisdiction after Switzerland and a separate report accused the Caribbean territory of playing a “key role” in the 2008 global financial crisis.
In response to the reports by the London-based Tax Justice Network, Richard Coles, chairman of Cayman Finance said, “We have never been more transparent and we have never had so many tax treaties with other jurisdictions.”
By Caribbean News Now
