Uber Global Wealth Chains

This chapter centres on ‘Luxury Freeports’, which are specialized storage sites where art and other high-end goods can be kept indefinitely without tax and duty-payments being made. The chapter makes the case that Luxury Freeports are best understood as new entrants in the ‘offshore world’, and shows how these sites have, over the course of the last ten years, taken up a new niche role in the evolving global ecosystem of tax avoidance. Further, it examines the rapid spread of this new form of offshore and traces it back to the combination of spillover effects within the offshore world itself. More specifically, Luxury Freeports stem from the juncture of a competitive ‘push’ from the rapid spread of Open Customs Warehouses at the turn of the century and the investment ‘pull’ of large pools of money needing new investment outlets in the wake of the recent multilateral effort to clamp down on banking secrecy.