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Bigger Stink Means Higher Price as Men Crave Rare Oud Fragrance
By Susan Hack – Sep 19, 2013 For centuries, scent hunters have indiscriminately cut down old-growth forests in search of the resin produced by wild Aquilaria trees, which is burned as incense, carved into ritual objects and distilled into oud — the most valuable natural oil on earth. Photograph: Mitchell Feinberg/Bloomberg Pursuits The first time Mike Perez wore dehn al-oud — an essential oil distilled from the resin of Asian Aquilaria trees — he was so appalled by the smell that he hid inside his home. Enlarge image Musk Oud by Kilian. Photograph: Courtesy of Kilian Enlarge image M7 Oud Absolu by Yves Saint Laurent. Photograph: Courtesy of YSL “I put on way too much, and frankly, it smelled like animal butt,” says Perez, a 42-year-old manager for Barclay’s Real Estate Group in Miami. Fragrances reveal their true nature as they evaporate on the skin, Bloomberg Pursuits magazine will report in its Autumn 2013 issue, so Perez resisted the temptation to wash. “The barnyard note started changing into something intensely woody, damp and complex,” recalls the fragrance enthusiast, who has a collection of almost 1,500 scents. “It lasted 24 hours, and by then, I understood why some have described oud as transcendent. I invited a friend over to try a tiny swipe; after the initial shock, he became emotional as it evoked memories of a boyhood vacation by a lake and the smell of his skin and bathing suit and even the dock drying in the summer sun.” Akin to such potent, primeval scents as ambergris and Himalayan deer musk, oud (the name means wood in Arabic) is an alluring mystery even to those who know it well. Used by the Ancient Egyptians for embalming and mentioned in the Bible’s Song of Solomon, the resin is produced by a rare and little-understood defense mechanism: When disease-carrying microbes breach the trunk of an Aquilaria tree, a dark and extremely aromatic resin is secreted, invisible beneath the outer bark. Burned as Incense For reasons still unknown to science, fewer than 2 percent of wild Aquilaria trees ever produce resin. For centuries, scent hunters have indiscriminately cut down old-growth forests in search of the substance, which is burned as incense, carved into ritual objects or distilled into the most valuable natural oil on earth. Half a teaspoon of oud oil made from 100-year-old trees for Oman’s Sultan Qaboos in 1982 sold to a private collector in 2012 for $7,000. In China , demand for top-quality resin has pushed prices as high as $300,000 per kilogram. Despite a ban on the harvesting of wild Aquilaria by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species , such pricing has triggered widespread poaching and a race to perfect sustainable techniques for artificially infecting farmed trees. Smell of Money To the $31.6 billion fragrance industry, oud and its aficionados smell like one thing: money. Sales of oud fragrances rose 34 percent in 2012, according to New York-based consumer research firm NPD Group Inc. Such scents were virtually unheard of in the global market before 2002, when Yves Saint Laurent released Tom Ford ’s M7, widely acknowledged as the first Western oud fragrance. Today, out of more than a thousand new scents released annually, one in eight contains oud. The developing taste for oud reflects “trends for intense, intriguing, daring scents that tap into a desire to travel and experience other cultures,” fragrance historian Elena Vosnaki says, and has helped drive sales of prestige male fragrances in the U.S. alone to $953 million. In the past year, Armani, Dior (CDI) , Ferrari and even the Body Shop have all jumped on the bandwagon. Perfumer Kilian Hennessy — the cognac heir who introduced Musk Oud, the latest in his line of oud fragrances, in June under the By Kilian label — caught the bug on a 2008 trip to Dubai, where oud incense wafting through malls, mosques and hotel lobbies has become as signature a scent as lavender is to Grasse, France . ‘Weapon of Seduction’ “To Westerners, men’s fragrance is a weapon of seduction,” Hennessy says. “But to people in the Arab Gulf, oud is comforting, part of their olfactory world and an envelope in which they feel protected.” The oud used in all By Kilian fragrances is synthetic, bioengineered to approximate the real deal. That said, “I have never smelled a synthetic oud that re-creates the complexity and intensity of the real one,” Hennessy says. According to Robert Blanchette , a forest pathologist at the University of Minnesota , the scent released by the highest-grade natural oud oils comprises more than 150 separate compounds. “Even with mass spectrometry and gas chromatography, we still don’t have the complete signature,” he says. Blanchette, who has spent two decades investigating Aquilaria trees in conjunction with the Amsterdam-based Rainforest Project foundation, has patented a technique to artificially infect saplings, 100 percent of which go on to produce resin, although it’s less dense than that of centuries-old trees. Chemical Signature “The chemical signature is very close, and our hope is that in the future, it will become a viable source,” he says. Meanwhile, “harvesting wild trees will eventually kill oud, because of the loss of biodiversity,” says Ensar, an online purveyor of organic oud who declines to reveal his full name and who spends much of the year in Asia seeking out the best resin. “Aquilaria trees have to fight disease and sometimes die for oud to come into existence,” he says. “I wanted to cry when I cut down a farmer’s 60-year-old tree in Thailand that was fully loaded with resin. It’s all extremely existential.” “Oud takes a commitment, both financially and in the way you wear it,” Barclay’s Perez says. “I wear it only on special occasions and never to the office. But most of the time, I wear it for myself.” To contact the reporter on this story: Susan Hack at hacksusan@aol.com To contact the editor responsible for this story: Ted Moncreiff at tmoncreiff@bloomberg.net Continue reading
The Secret World Of Tax Havens
An anonymous source has provided extensive insights into a worldwide network of tax evaders. Media in more than 30 countries are currently sifting through a mountain of data. 260 gigabytes of documents – that’s the printed equivalent of 500,000 copies of the Bible. This is the massive amount of data that was passed on more than a year ago by an anonymous whistleblower to the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) in Washington. More than two million emails and other confidential documents sketch a picture of a dubious shadow world. More than 130,000 people from 170 countries are alleged to have secreted their money in tax havens. Analyzing the data is a mammoth task that is still nowhere near completion. Challenge for computer forensics experts The anonymous source secretly lifted the data from two company servers and transferred it via the Internet. “Unfortunately, in order to protect the source, it’s not possible to say anything more about exactly how this was done, but it’s clear that there was a substantial leak,” says German data journalist Sebastian Mondial, who is one of those analyzing the material. This means that at a certain point these companies’ secrets were accessible in such a way that someone was able to make a copy, Mondial explained in an interview with DW. Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung daily writes that much of the data was not very well organized, and that some of the documents first had to be converted so they could be read by machine. “We were lucky that we had some specific forensic software that’s usually used by criminologists,” says Mondial. This, he explains, made it possible to scan these databases and examine them to find out things like what connections existed between pieces of data, when documents were created, when emails were sent and who received blind copies of emails. The Virgin Islands are just one of many tax havens Havens of tranquility and tax evasion The British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands, the Seychelles, Panama: All of them have something very attractive to offer to certain companies and private individuals – anonymity. “‘Come to us and you won’t have to worry about the tax office finding out.’ This is the kind of slogan these so-called offshore islands use to attract rich people,” says Thomas Eigenthaler from the German financial managers’ union (DSTG). He explains that the tax evasion is made easier by the fact that the taxpayers don’t have to deal with it themselves. A whole industry has sprung up to advise them and offer tailor-made solutions. Sebastian Mondial adds that many tax havens don’t even keep any kind of register with information on company owners or capital. The EU estimates that every year around a trillion euros in tax revenue is lost through tax evasion or tax avoidance. According to a study by the non-governmental organization Tax Justice Network, a fortune estimated at between 21 to 32 trillion dollars is stashed away in tax havens. By comparison, in 2011 the gross domestic product of the United States was around 15.1 trillion dollars. The figure doesn’t even include non-financial assets and gold held abroad, foreign properties, or luxury yachts sailing under foreign flags. “According to my colleagues working on the project, there’s a particularly clever trick they pull when someone is sued by an offshore company. They agree on a settlement, and the complaint is dropped,” explains Sebastian Mondial. Then the settlement money, which, as part of a lawsuit, does not have to be taxed, is transferred to the offshore account. There are other tricks, too. For example, a company can set up a subsidiary in a tax haven to deal with its foreign operations, thereby avoiding paying tax on foreign profits. Offshore firms often are little more than a letter box Is Germany also a tax haven? Private individuals resident in Germany have to pay tax of up to 45 percent on their earnings. Companies whose main office is in Germany have to pay corporate tax and business tax. But in Germany too there are loopholes that the cunning can take advantage of. “If a German-based business seeks advice from an offshore company, the offshore company issues an invoice, and the money is transferred. To the tax office, this looks like a perfectly normal transaction,” says Mondial. However, it means that the money has been moved out of the country, and no further taxes will be paid on it. According to German law the burden of proof lies with the tax office, not with the companies. And this burden is too heavy for the German system to bear, Eigenthaler says: “We don’t have the capacity to do all the checks. Sometimes we wait years for an answer from overseas authorities. But there’s also a lack of political will. I always have the sense that people at the top are being too lax in their pursuit of tax evaders.” Furthermore, the influence of the German state ends at the border. “If money is transferred out of Germany to another country, the German treasury has no way of locating it – unless Germany has a tax agreement with the relevant state that includes the exchange of information,” Eigenthaler explains. But why would somewhere like the Cayman Islands have an interest in torpedoing its own business model by signing such an agreement? And as Eigenthaler points out, even if an agreement were reached, it doesn’t mean it would necessarily be followed to the letter. The data leak and its consequences For years now international organizations like the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) have been trying to establish measures against tax fraud and standardize regulations. According to the OECD, progress has been made since a blacklist was published in 2009 naming four countries as tax havens. 700 agreements were reached regarding the exchange of information, and around 40 judicial verdicts have led to some changes in the law. Might the revelations contained in these databases be of assistance in the international fight against tax fraudsters? Yes, but only indirectly, according to the computer forensics journalist Sebastian Mondial. He says he hopes that the actual data will never be published. The point of the exercise is not simply to put all of these firms’ data on the Internet and let everyone look at it to see who has transferred how much money, or who owns which companies. Rather, says Mondial, “The lawmakers and the respective countries must somehow find a way of establishing transparency.” Continue reading
19322 Diamond Park Circle, Cypress, Texas REAL ESTATE FOR SALE
Newmark built home w/ recent upgrades including new 18 tile floors, crown moldings, hand scraped wood floor in DR, & upgraded lighting. Recent oak bannisters… Continue reading
