Party donor named in Panama Papers – for the Greens!

Stuff reports:

A Green Party donor has been listed in the database of the Panama Papers documents leak.

Kiwi rich-lister Forbes Herbert Elworthy was named in the offshore leaks documents, associated with a Singapore trust and entities in the British Virgin Islands.

Elworthy donated $15,000 to the Green Party in 2011 during the election campaign.

Now imagine if Mr Elworthy was a donor to National. The Greens would be indignant and decrying Mr Elworthy and saying that National is funded through people who use tax havens and avoid or evade tax, Labour would agree, and the media would all write long columns about how awful a look this is for National and John Key.

Shaw made clear the party were not against Kiwis having trusts overseas, they just wanted more transparency and disclosure on their details.

But Andrew Little says they are of no value and should be banned entirely.

“It’s not whether someone’s got a foreign trust, it’s whether they’re doing anything illegitimate such as tax avoidance, money laundering of anything like that,” he said.

First of all tax avoidance is not illegal. The Greens promote tax avoidance. Their policy to exempt electric cars from fringe benefit tax would lead to massive tax avoidance. They think that is okay so long as it tax avoidance for something they approve of.