While President Barack Obama excoriated Mitt Romney for his investments in the Cayman Islands, the White House is vigorously defending Treasury Secretary-nominee Jack Lew’s investments there.
Lew held shares in a Cayman-based fund when he worked at Citigroup from 2006-08, a
Wall Street Journal editorial reports. The Caymans have no corporate income tax.
“An Obama spokesman suggests that Mr. Lew's Caymans investment . . . was a model of transparency and says that ‘Jack Lew paid all of his taxes and reported all of the income, gains, and losses from the investment on his tax returns,’" the editorial states
But, “for years Democrats have denounced the Caymans . . . as a refuge for tax cheats.”
In 2008, Senate Finance Committee Chairman, Democrat Max Baucus held an entire hearing on Ugland House, a small Caymans building which is a legal home to thousands of businesses and investment partnerships. Businesses base themselves there for reasons that "have a lot to do with tax evasion," Baucus said.
“One might therefore expect that the appointment of an investor in an Ugland-based fund to oversee the IRS would cause Mr. Baucus to blow a gasket,” Journal editors write. “But on Monday the Montana Democrat expressed his hope that Mr. Lew would be ‘quickly confirmed.’"
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