A/HRC/22/42 complex web of corporate vehicles based in secrecy jurisdictions and tax havens and are subsequently invested in shares, real estate or other assets, often together with wealth acquired through legitimate means. Assets held offshore (that is, in jurisdictions where the investor has no legal residence or tax domicile) were estimated to amount to US$7.4 trillion in 2009.29 While European investors hold the largest amount off assets offshore – mostly in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Luxembourg – the percentage of wealth held offshore by investors from Latin America, Africa and the Middle East is particularly high. According to the Boston Consulting Group, investors from Latin America, the Middle East and Africa hold between 23.5 and 33.3 per cent of their wealth in offshore financial centres.30 The banking research firm MyPrivateBanking has estimated that 41 per cent of all offshore assets from the Middle East and Africa are in European Union countries, including the United Kingdom (in the Channel Islands), while 33 per cent of these offshore assets are located in Switzerland. The United States and Latin American and Caribbean countries account for 18 per cent, while Asia, notably Singapore, accounts for 8 per cent of offshore assets from the Middle East and North Africa. 31 Australia is regarded as the main destination of illicit funds from Papua New Guinea. 32 21. The Asset Recovery Watch database of the StAR Initiative provides an indication of where stolen assets have so far been detected by criminal investigators. As of October 2012, it covered 199 international asset recovery efforts. The database includes 49 recovery efforts in the United States, 32 in the United Kingdom (including the Channel Islands) and 31 in Switzerland. Other reported recovery efforts include: Nigeria (7), France (6), Iraq (6), Lesotho (5) and Australia (4).33 However, the database includes only publically reported recovery efforts that have come to the attention of the World Bank/UNODC research team and may underestimate the location of illicit assets in countries or jurisdictions that have so far been less active in international asset recovery efforts and may not include cases reported in national media only. 22. During the 2009 financial crisis, the fight against tax evasion became a political priority in wealthy countries and the pressure on tax havens mounted. In early 2012, a study evaluating the “G20 tax haven crackdown”, which compelled tax havens to sign more than 300 bilateral treaties providing for exchange of bank information, was published. The study concluded that these “treaties have led to a relocation of bank deposits between tax havens but have not triggered significant repatriations of funds. The least compliant havens have attracted new clients, while the most compliant ones have lost some, leaving roughly unchanged the total amount of wealth managed offshore”.34 While the Channel Island of Jersey, Luxembourg and Switzerland lost between 0.5 and 4 per cent of deposits by foreigners, Singapore, the Cayman Islands and Hong Kong attracted between 2 and 3 per cent more funds.35 Furthermore, most bilateral treaties were signed between OECD countries and tax havens or between tax havens, thus hardly contributing to the reduction of tax evasion suffered by developing countries. 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 10 See UNODC, Estimating illicit financial flows, p. 44. Ibid, p. 45. MyPrivateBanking, What the Arab Revolution Means for Wealth Managers (Kreuzlingen, MyPrivateBanking, 2011). See Jason Sharman, Chasing Kleptocrats’ Loot: Narrowing the Effectiveness Gap, U4 Issue No. 4 (August 2012), p. 7. See http://star.worldbank.org/corruption-cases/arw. Niels Johannesen and Gabriel Zucman, “The End of Bank Secrecy? An Evaluation of the G20 Tax Haven Crackdown”, Working Paper, No. 2012-4 (Paris School of Economics, 2012), p. 26. Available from http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/74/86/51/PDF/wp201204.pdf. Ibid., figure 4.