A former I-banker of my acquaintance once tried to explain schemes like these to me. There's one call the "Double Dutch Sandwich", involving sending the money on a roundtrip through Holland, then Ireland, then Holland again. Or was it the other way around? Either way, it made me think fondly of PHP spaghetti code.

edit: I got it wrong. There's the "Double Irish" and the "Dutch Sandwich".

I think the Dutch Sandwich is something like - you move all the money to Netherlands, so no tax in the rest of Europe (common market) then to a Dutch owned off-shore tax haven like the Dutch Antilles - so you pay no tax in the Netherlands either.

I suppose the Netherlands have double-taxation agreements with many places in the world, see https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Double_taxati...