Flight from Freedom

The big scandal, which in a literal sense brought out the U.S. legislators, turned into the co-founder of the social network Facebook, Eduardo Saverin, giving up his American citizenship.

In the past few years the number of Americans giving up their U.S. citizenship is shooting up. In 2008, only 235 people renounced their American passports. At the beginning of the next year, ex-Americans numbered 1,800 already. The main reason for this “flight” is that people do not want to pay such high taxes.

Capitol Hill accused Saverin of this very thing. “We simply cannot allow the ultra-wealthy to write their own rules,” said Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, adding “Mr. Saverin has benefited greatly from being a citizen of the United States but he has chosen to cast it aside and leave U.S. taxpayers with the bill.”

The legislators had cause for such petulance since Eduardo Saverin’s decision to relinquish his passport was made not long before Facebook’s IPO entrance. The public offering of stock brought in billions of dollars to the Internet company. It is well known that Saverin, who was the former partner of Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg, today owns a batch of 4 percent of Facebook shares, which accounts for $3 billion.

According to the culprit of the famous scandal, he decided to become a citizen of Singapore to move to this country and invest resources into the Aztec markets. “This had nothing to do with taxes. I was born in Brazil, I was an American citizen for about 10 years. I thought of myself as a global citizen,” Saverin told the journalists.

It is true that in America there is hardly anyone that would question that the rich young person’s switch of citizenship was to escape paying large taxes to the U.S. Treasury. According to the most conservative calculations, it could refer to hundreds of billions of dollars.

“Saverin has turned his back on the country that welcomed him and kept him safe, educated him, and helped him become a billionaire,” Sen. Chuck Schumer said, and promised, “We aren’t going to let him get away with it.”

The law, which is made at Capitol Hill for urgent matters, should not only prohibit all former and future “traitors who are native to America” from returning to the territory of the U.S., but will also impose high taxes on all of the “deserters.”

In the case of the U.S. Congress embracing the new law about “expatriates,” any American who possesses a fortune of $2 million and has given up his or her citizenship of the “most democratic nation in the world,” automatically becomes a person striving to escape paying taxes in America.

Since the presentation of the senators, as an incentive of the legislation, it is proposed to “hang” a 30 percent tax on their future revenue from investment activities on well-to-do people who are relinquishing their American passport. Besides that, these ex-citizens may be prohibited from returning to the U.S. All ex-Americans who gave up their U.S. citizenship in the past 10 years might fall under the “tax rip-off.”