Offshore finance and global governance : disciplining the tax nomad [Book Review]

Abstract

I stumbled across the term ‘nomad millionaire’ in Ronan Palan’s 2003 book on The Offshore World. In this opportune text, Vlcek uses this increasingly maligned term to describe a growing and assorted cluster of individuals and firms who seek to minimise, and possibly completely avoid and stamp out, their tax obligations among multiple jurisdictions; leaving most of us, taxpaying residents, to foot the bill of massive public debt. The most powerful asset in their arsenal is not simply the significant wealth and financial capital that these persons (real or corporate) have amassed, and its political leverage, but the mobility with which they graft their assets, enabling a strategic determination of when and where to place which portion of their money and for how long. The mobility of their liquid resources, and at times of themselves, is so extensive that it effectively lacks domicile. Nomadism has taken mobility to a higher level. And globalisation and the digital economy (and now crypto-currencies?) have given bold wings to tax minimisation.