(CNS Business): Following an article in Vanity Fair this week on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s offshore accounts, President Barak Obama has renewed his efforts on his official website to discredit his opponent’s patriotism by focusing on Romney’s avoidance of paying US taxes. Using snippets from the Vanity Fair article, written by “Treasure Islands” author Nicholas Shaxson, the Obama website has updated a world map highlighting five low- or no-tax jurisdictions – the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Ireland – where the Romney family is known to have accounts.

“Has Mitt Romney avoided US taxes by investing millions in tax havens? We’ll never know because he won’t release his returns,” says the heading above the graphic.

Shaxson covers Romney’s continuing association with Bain Capital, a private-equity firm he founded, and says the firm “has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers. Again, the Romney campaign insists he saves no tax by using them, but there is no way to check this.”

Lee Sheppard, a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Notes, says in the article, “Romney is the poster boy, the best argument, for taxing this profit share as ordinary income.”

Dubbing Romney as “The Caped Avoider”, Shaxson says his defense is that he never broke the rules and if there is a problem, it is in the laws. But he quotes Sheppard: “When you are running for president, you might want to err on the side of overpaying your taxes, and not chase every tax gimmick that comes down the pike. It kind of looks tacky.”

Where the Money Lives by Nicholas Shaxson (Vanity Fair)

www.barakobama.com

Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world by Nicholas Shaxson