Panama Papers: Massive Tax Haven Document Leak Exposes Corruption and Crime on Global Scale. It’s being called the “Panama Papers” — a trove of 11.5 million leaked internal documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, showing how hundreds of thousands of people with money to hide used anonymous shell corporations across the world. A global industry of law firms and large banks sell financial secrecy services to politicians, crooks and drug dealers as well as billionaires, celebrities and sports stars. Here are the famous politicos in ‘the Wikileaks of the mega-rich.’ The secretive arrangements allow the owners to escape tax scrutiny.
Among the other politicians implicated in the leak are Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and many others. It reveals that Putin secretly has a personal fortune of up to $US2 billion ($A2.61 billion) managed through banks and shadow corporations. Other documents show that Chinese President Xi Jinping, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson and the deceased father of British Prime Minister David Cameron all have had assets managed by offshore companies.
Not surprising, ICIJ takes an early focus on Soros arch enemy Vladimir Putin, when reporting on the details in the 11 million plus documents. … I’m sure, though, no George Soros-linked accounts will be discovered.
It does not appear that there is a search engine so that the curious will be able to browse the documents. If this is the case, of course, we will only hear about what the gatekeepers want us to hear about.
Not a single prominent US or PC name features in the exposes so far. Don’t we live in corrupt and cynical times?
UPDATE: The Nazi, CIA And Nevada Connections. This is not a story about super wealthy individuals doing everything in their power to avoid taxes, preserve their financial anonymity, and generally preserve their wealth, so much as about the nebulous world of offshore tax evasion and tax havens, which based on data from the World Bank, IMF, UN, and central banks, hide between $21 and $32 trillion. By compairson, world GDP is about $70 trillion, and the total amount of money/debt in the world is around $220 trillion (money is debt in the current system, mostly).
The founders of the Panamanian company have connections to Nazis, the CIA, and Mexican drug lords. It turns out that the The World’s Favorite New Tax Haven Is the United States, and specifically several US states such as Nevada, Wyoming and South Dakota — dirty foreign and local – money is welcome in the U.S., no questions asked, to be shielded by the most impenetrable tax secrecy available anywhere on the planet.
UPDATE: The Australian Financial Review:
World leaders who have embraced anti-corruption platforms feature in the leaked documents. The files reveal offshore companies linked to the family of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, who has vowed to fight “armies of corruption”, as well as Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who has positioned himself as a reformer in a country shaken by corruption scandals.
