Madeira, with a score of 55 percent, appears near the ’moderately secret’ end of the scale and the NGO dedicated an entire page to the island. The file on offshore financial services mentions that Madeira is responsible for less than 1 percent of the overall market for these services, meaning it is a minor operator.
Madeira had the worst classifications in items related with the legal transparency of the entity in question – ownership, accounts and tax rate paid – and with property registration, namely limited international cooperation and ownership of other assets.
The NGO said that the amount of money circulating annually undercover like this is somewhere between 1 and 1.6 trillion dollars and compared this to the US foreign aid budget of $135 billion.
Portugal is pointed out to be one of the losers from this phenomenon. The TJN said “Rich countries also suffer. For instance, European countries such as Greece, Italy and Portugal were brought to their knees partly because of decades of tax evasion and pillaging of state resources because of offshore secrecy”.
The information is available on https://www.financialsecrecyindex.com/.