The Panama Papers (2016) are the 11.5 million files of Mossack Fonseca, a law firm based in Panama that hides money for the rich and powerful. It names names. It cover the years 1977 to 2015.
It is the biggest data leak to date: it is Edward Snowden times ten, WikiLeaks times a thousand.
Among Mossack Fonseca’s customers:
- past and present leaders (or those close to them) of 25 countries: Argentina, Azerbaijan, Britain, China, Egypt, Georgia, Ghana, Guinea, Iceland, Iraq, Ivory Coast, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Syria, UAE, Ukraine.
- 128 public officials throughout the world and
- 29 billionaires.
The prime minister of Iceland has already resigned.
The US: So far no US president, presidential candidate or even public official has been named (at least in the US press).
China has blocked news of the Panama Papers. The Economist, at least in its early reporting, failed to point out that Ian Cameron, father of the British prime minister, is among the named.
ICIJ: The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), made up of reporters from 78 countries, got the files about a year ago. Since then they have been going through them, their first reports appearing in the press on April 3rd 2016. There is still more to come. It is only day four!
Offshore banking: It has long been known that dictators, drug lords and the rich hide much of their money offshore in places like the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands – to avoid taxes or the law. But the Panama Papers names names and amounts – and makes it clear that the Western press more readily reports the corruption of non-Western leaders than their own.
Mossack Fonseca: If you, say, rob Heathrow Airport of 3.5 tons of gold, as one of their customers did in 1983, or take a huge bribe, the lawyers at Mossack Fonseca can help. They can set it up so that you can spend your fortune without the authorities (or ex-wives or voters) being able to know much if anything about it. Mossack Fonseca has offices all over the world. It is one of the four largest such companies.
Shell companies: Mossack Fonseca hides money mainly by creating shell companies. It has created hundreds of thousands of them, mainly in the
British Virgin Islands and Panama. Shell companies hide where their
money comes from and who it benefits. Well, it hides it till there is
a data leak!
Brought to you by Mossack Fonseca:
- Higher taxes/poor public services: The US loses some $100 billion in taxes from offshore banking. Poor countries, though, are harder hit since they can ill afford to lose any taxes.
- War, refugees: Mossack Fonseca maintains its innocence, but it is clear from emails that it knew it was helping Syria avoid international sanctions so that it could keep its planes and helicopters in the air in the civil war, a war that has killed hundreds of thousands and driven millions from their homes.
– Abagond, 2016.
Update (October 16th 2017): Daphne Caruana Galizia, one of the journalists who worked on the Panama Papers, was murdered this afternoon in Malta. When she started her car it blew up. More at The Guardian.
See also:
- The ICIJ: The Panama Papers – the ICIJ’s website on the Panama Papers.
- Edward Snowden
- The Economist
- Top mass murders of 2015
- propaganda model
- Broken Africa stereotype
536
Oh, I think this is going to be much, much bigger, and yes! the US will be named.
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Your point about a closed associate of Putin is wrong. Nowhere in that 11.5 million files implicates Putin or his family.
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@ Martin Delaney
Three of Putin’s friends have been named. One of them, Sergei Roldugin, is the godfather of one of his daughters.
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(https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160403-putin-russia-offshore-network.html)
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My first thoughts after watching the news about The Panama Papers was, uhau… after all, the corrupts are not only African politicians and people, as many try to claim. Many other social, political and entrepreneurial actors in other latitudes are corrupt too! The difference is mainly that they are more able to hide their sins.
By the way, I’m not trying to defend corrupt African politicians: their malpractices are one of the main obstacles against the economic grow and political consolidation of African societies, and as soon as Africa get rid of them, better.
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Still reading and trying to get to grips with the magnitude of something this huge.
A bit of irony that Gonzalo Delaveu, head of global corruption watchdog Transparency International’s Chile branch was one of Mossack Fonseca’s clients.
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A good day for democracy!
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“It is interesting but not at all mysterious that there are no Americans named in the Mossack Fonseca documents. The reason is simple. U.S. law so clearly favors the rich that they have no need to go offshore to form shell corporations.
They can do so legally in Wyoming, Delaware or Nevada. Rich people everywhere know it too.
No need to go to Panama or Switzerland.
The U.S. is now the best tax haven on the planet. Hopefully the corporate media will decide to cover that story too.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/06/the-panama-papers-problem/
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I hate national corporate television news. I noticed yesterday that that they avoided the Panama Papers story like the plague. Instead they intensified their “kittens were rescued by firefighters” type stories as a diversion.
So very lame.
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bbc news and the guardian scooped this that i could tell. it was later it made it to cnn, and then it wasn’t really spun the same way
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@abagond i guess you don’t support the assad regime, then.
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@ v8driver
LOL. Nope.
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V8driver said,
“i guess you don’t support the assad regime, then”
In L.A. where I live their are a number of Syrian Christians that support Assad. He allowed religious plurality and didn’t oppress them. Some Syrian American youth here went back to fight for Assad.
I think it’s odd that Americans aren’t on the list. Their is more to this story that’s being hidden. Their are a lot of American expats their and a friend of mine just moved their.
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Maybe the hack came from the U.S. Government looking for terrorist money ect. They cleaned the list of Americans because of their prominence within the political hierarchy. Probably players from both parties. The I.R.S. approaches them quietly. The list though gets released because it’s a good propaganda ploy. It works against Putin and others and takes the attention off of the Americans.
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@michaeljonbarkerdark
You sure have your finger on the pulse. Do you think that if the American public got wind of the ( the not yet established) Democrats and Republican’s money in the Fonseca debacle , that it might swing voters to Bernie Sanders?
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@ michaeljonbarker
Forgive the typographical error: My cursor jumps all over the show.
“public got wind of the dark money”
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American politics is very scary. And Viilagewriter is also very astute:
“The Panama papers are just the tip of the Ice Berg. I have always suspected that the world economy has been rigged by a few filthy rich people in the USA and Europe. I have been proven right countless times. John Pilger has opened my eyes on why we have wars and who those wars benefit.”
“Washington is behind the recently released offshore revelations known as the Panama Papers, WikiLeaks has claimed, saying that the attack was “produced” to target Russia and President Putin.”
“The American government is pursuing a policy of destabilization all over the world, and this [leak] also serves this purpose of destabilization. They are causing a lot of people all over the world and also a lot of money to find its way into the [new] tax havens in America. The US is preparing for a super big financial crisis, and they want all that money in their own vaults and not in the vaults of other countries,” German journalist and author Ernst Wolff told RT.
“On Wednesday, the international whistleblowing organization said on Twitter that the Panama Papers data leak was produced by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), “which targets Russia and [the] former USSR.” The “Putin attack” was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and American hedge fund billionaire George Soros, WikiLeaks added, saying that the US government’s funding of such an attack is a serious blow to its integrity.”
Reading from the list of leaked Fonseca clients- businessmen and political top dogs, etc from the USA , European Union and World Bank or any members of the Bilderberg group are conspicuously absent.
Sarcasm- unless they hide their (dark) money in US tax havens like Wyoming, Delaware or Nevada or in Switzerland. Coincidentally.
(https://www.rt.com/news/338683-wikileaks-usaid-putin-attack/)
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Another clue. The story first came out in Germany. Besides the Americans, Germans are also missing from the list lol
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/business/panama-papers-germany-1.3524705
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The Panama Papers was initially obtained by one of the Germany’s leading newspapers ‘ Sueddeutsche Zeitungand’ . Mossack Fonseca was co-founded by Germany-born Juergen Mossack. Yet the German public do not know any of the ‘brothel owners and nobility’ in the leaks.
So far, Australia and Japan’s public official’s are also squeaky clean.
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Correction: Australia’s and officials
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America is the world’s 3rd largest tax haven. Here you can start a “foundation” like the Clinton’s which is a tax shelter. I imagine that most politicians have tax shelters set up here so they don’t need to move their money off shore. Same with big business and corporations.
What I would like to see here is income only becoming taxable if you make over 250,000 a year. That would stimulate the economy for the working class and actually allow for the possibility of upward mobility.
The system is set up to suck income from the bottom of the economic hierarchy to the top. The top can easily fund the U.S. but it isn’t set up that way.
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@ taotesan
Actually, today one of the government-owned banks in Germany has been implicated.
Also David Cameron seems to have had money in one of the shell companies.
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These papers doesn’t implicate Putin nor his family, so you saying that in your article is wrong. So what if his friends are implicated I’m not referring to them.
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@ Martin Delaney
Because they have become unaccountably rich. That money almost certainly comes from Putin.
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@michaeljonbarker
Yes, another name for it is “free loading”. Working people pay the freight and the people at the top ride for free…while they hoard piles of cash.
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@Kartoffel
Right, there’s huge backlash against Cameron because it took him so long to admit it and it makes him seem hypocritical since he’s going after offshore tax evaders. He claims he sold shares in 2010 for £30,000, and it was 100% legal, he paid dividends taxes to Britain and no capital gains taxes were due. But my question is why would it need to be done in the Bahamas if not to avoid taxes?
This seems like the first real threat to Cameron’s premiership, only a few weeks after Iain Duncan Smith resigned. It’ll be interesting to see how Corbyn takes advantage of this.
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@michaeljonbarker
“What I would like to see here is income only becoming taxable if you make over 250,000 a year.”
I would support that, although I don’t see it as fair. And you would expect the Democrats to support such a scheme, but they won’t. Instead they’ve supported tax hikes on the middle class.
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@ resw
For me equality of justice should be the emphasis of a society. If people are able to pursue their economic interests free from third party intervention then economic justice should naturally follow.
It’s like the 15.00 dollar an hour minimum wage debate. It’s likely to benefit more whites then Blacks and favor corporate franchises over small businesses and family run operations. It could slow economic growth in some sectors. So I think it has unintended consequences that cancel out whatever gains in economic justice that are percieved.
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@ resw
Now I read that Cameron probably didn’t do anything wrong and that the fund was set up by his father to allow dollar investments for Britons, which was a lot more difficult at the time. If that is all that is to it, I don’t see how this will turn into a scandal. But I bet there are a couple of surprises more in the pipeline.
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This is how the Clinton foundation avoids taxes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-foundation-reveals-up-to-26million-in-additional-payments/2015/05/21/e49da740-0009-11e5-833c-a2de05b6b2a4_story.html
I don’t see how you can get donations from Wall Street, Fossil fuels and foreign governments and not think their isn’t any political favor here.
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WikiLeaks points to the U.S. Government and George Sonos as the players behind the leak.
Not sure what to think.
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/WikiLeaks-US-Govt-Behind-Panama-Leaks-to-Attack-Putin-20160406-0026.html
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^^ *George Soros
What I’m getting at it hard to discern what the “truth” is an a story like this since it involves world leaders, billionaires ect who largely influence the media.
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@Kartoffel
“…the fund was set up by his father to allow dollar investments for Britons, which was a lot more difficult at the time.”
I don’t buy that it was easier to invest in US dollar terms in the Bahamas than in London. And that doesn’t even explain why the company had to be set up offshore.
The Guardian reported that Blairmore never paid any taxes on profits to Britain in 30 years because they made sure that a majority of the Board was based outside Britain. So it was definitely set up offshore to avoid taxes.
Yes, it was set up in a lawful way, but I think it’s hypocritical for Cameron to make such a big fuss about tax evasion, when he himself participated in a tax evasion scheme for so long.
It is equally hypocritical for the British government to be leading the charge on offshore tax evasion when such is being done primarily in British dependencies such as Cayman Islands, Guernsey, etc.
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@michaeljonbarker
“So I think it has unintended consequences that cancel out whatever gains in economic justice that are percieved.”
Agree, although I don’t see what economic justice has to do with minimum wage.
“WikiLeaks points to the U.S. Government and George Sonos as the players behind the leak.”
Not surprising. I follow someone who sort of predicted this a long time ago. I think more is to come.
“I don’t see how you can get donations from Wall Street, Fossil fuels and foreign governments and not think their isn’t any political favor here”
I agree, and Trump pretty much exposed this when he said, “Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding, and she came to my wedding. She had no choice because I gave to a foundation.”
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@michaeljonbarker
I live in an area with $15.00 an hour minimum wage. The sky has not fallen in and businesses are not folding.
What has happened is that low wage workers are more mobile. They are shopping for work with companies that pay more. People have more money to spend.
There are more “help wanted” signs now than before the increase. Well managed businesses have raised their rates to cover the increase. Businesses of all sizes are expanding and hiring.
The small business owners I know all say the same thing: ” I could expand faster/take on more business, etc. if I could hire more workers!”
The biggest problem in this area is not a high minimum wage, it is a sky high cost of living, especially housing. Many low wage and moderate wage workers have been forced to move to cheaper suburbs, increasing commutes and road congestion. Some hardy souls even trek over mountain passes two or more hours per day for affordable housing.
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Kiwi said
“Imagine the kind of place the world would be if people cared about white-collar crime the way they cared about street crime.”
China. They imprison and kill more people then any other country on Earth because they go after all crime equally. It’s not a Utopia.
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Kiwi said
“Imagine the kind of place the world would be if people cared about white-collar crime the way they cared about street crime.”
China. They imprison and kill more people then any other country on Earth because they go after all crime equally. It’s not a Utopia.
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In other words some extremely important information that is sure to affect the interplay between politics and economics by giving the common people………oooh is that Tyga with that shemale porn star again, no better Yeezus is still no.1OMG #KanyeKardassian4EVA
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@satanforce
That sounds just like the national evening news script delivered by male and female models, er, newscasters. LOL!
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Nope. It’s reality. Just what did the last two big leaks change? On the torrent sites, I see hundreds of seeds for the latest ‘Blacked’, “but single digits for the wiki leaks files. People are too atomised nowadays to do anything against the System.
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UK’s Cameron is facing increasing protests, and he’s gone from saying his taxes are personal matters to admitting that he benefited from an offshore fund to releasing tax filings to announcing he would tighten the law.
Corbyn took him to task today, calling out his donations from companies cited in the Panama papers and calling for him to publish all his tax returns and undergo investigation. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2QyqlnhT4o)
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMlptrkXOZc)
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@satanforce
It is easy to get that impression if the corporate news is your main source of information (that’s probably not true for you). Their primary functions are to distract, deceive and depress their viewers/readers/listeners. When people are depressed and feeling hopeless they will submit to anything. As you well know, submission of the general population is near the top of the agenda for the Global Masters.
However, if you do a bit of digging and reading with heavy propaganda filters on, globally, you will find millions of people engaged in resistence and fightback against the System.
➽There are people in India who have shutdown attempts by mining corps to destroy their forests and watersheds.
➽There are people all over the continent of Africa who are resisting land grabs.
➽There are anti-government demonstrations all over China (yes China!) on a weekly basis against corruption and theft.
➽There are numerous rallies and direct actions in Brazil against state violence and racism.
➽There are a multitude of small and medium sized community organizations in America that struggle against gentifrication, homelessness, poor schools and the death penalty.
That’s just scratching the surface of issues people are mobilized to work on or resist. They don’t get much media coverage. Many focus their efforts locally. It can take years to get results and sometimes they “win” and sometimes they don’t. Yet, groups of engaged people are out there and they are fighting for a better tomorrow.
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Update (October 16th 2017): Daphne Caruana Galizia, one of the journalists who worked on the Panama Papers, was murdered this afternoon in Malta. When she started her car it blew up.
(https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist)
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