The Panama Papers

Who wants to talk about the world of shady international finance? Well too bad! Because that is what is on my mind this evening.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released what is known as the Panama Papers on April 3, the papers consist of over 11.5 million documents detailing the activities of the law firm Mossack Fonseca over the last almost forty years.

If you only ever follow one link I post, click that one and read everything they say there, it is methodically detailed and explained clearly.

For those who refuse to click links, Mossack Fonseca is in the business of setting up shell corporations for people and organizations who are interested in the tax benefits of a company that isn't based in their home country, or who want to have assets separated from their other companies for assorted, usually legitimate, liability reasons.

Note I said usually legitimate, the subjects mentioned so far include people involved with the Watergate scandal, unsolved thefts, terrorist organizations, nations like North Korea, and of course the usual people and organizations just interested in laundering money or avoiding taxes. Such as UK Prime Minister David Cameron's father, and known minions of Vladimir Putin.

I have virtually no expertise in international finance law and can't really speak to what the consequences of this might be, but I suspect they are pretty dramatic, a number of nations have already announced investigations based on what the ICIJ has already released, and they haven't actually released the entirety of the documents yet, and won't until May. They think they are on to something though, and have an extremely slick site to guide people through the connections discovered so far, it's in that link I posted at the beginning.

As a piece of investigative journalism it is pretty much unrivaled, with hundreds of journalists from dozens of organizations and countries having worked on the data for over a year before they announced it the other day. The documents were delivered by an individual whose name hasn't, and I suspect never will be, released and who asked for nothing but guarantees of security. My guess is if we ever know who they are, it will be because they were found dead or disappeared. I also suspect that in the last year they have found rather a lot of corroborating evidence to back it up.

But enough of that, I want to talk about the things that haven't been talked about in the information released so far, first the list of  Reporting Partners on the ICIJ site consists of organizations from around the world, but strangely doesn't include a major news network based in the USA, there are a couple of ABC affiliates in other countries, and Columbia University is mentioned as well, but the players like Fox News, NBC, CNN, and so on are conspicuously absent, the question on my mind is why, where they not trusted to keep it secret until the information was verified, or is it something more sinister? Either option wouldn't surprise me.
Which leads me to my next question, dozens of individuals are named in the papers as using Mossack Fonseca, again from all over the world, but once again one country is absent from the list, yes the USA has virtually no individuals mentioned so far. There are a few reasons I can think of for that, the first being that Americans simply don't cheat the system like that, this is laughable and I will disregard it, more likely is that when Americans need to hide their cash they use a different firm or a different location, given the diversity of clients listed so far I find that unlikely but possible, another is that we hide our money better, and if the trial was followed far enough we'd find connections from Americans to supposedly unrelated corporations through may different shells and cutouts. The last option, and to me the most likely, is that the ICIJ purposely withheld that information, perhaps due to working with law enforcement agencies already, or perhaps to simply drop an immense bombshell when the full documents are released in May.

If I am wrong, and I may well be, this is still a fascinating look behind the scenes at how the very rich and powerful maintain their, well, wealth and power. For most of us the ability, or even the need, to do something like this to avoid taxes is incomprehensible, but there is a class of people that do it as a matter of course and a whole industry devoted to servicing that need. The fact that it is shady at best and illegal at worst doesn't bother anyone involved, because they don't see themselves as answering to the law. With any luck at all, a number of those involved will find out they were wrong about that, but I suspect they still won't really understand why they were wrong to do it in the first place.

But if I am right and there are a bunch of powerful American sources in there? That will be amazing, a real scandal of massive implications and possibly a string to pull that unravels an entire section of the international banking industry.

I know have something to look forward to that isn't related to the primary race and it's pretty cool.

But wait, what if there is something related to it? That is impossible because I am pretty sure we don't live in the best of all possible worlds, but a man can dream.