Russian cartoonist Sergei Yolkin on the Russian cellist who invests in Panama.
Interview with journalist and filmmaker Mark Donne:
“You really have to think of the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands and all those territories as branches, nothing more than just branches,” Donne told teleSUR in an interview Monday. “They are only physical spaces because there has to be a physical territory where one can register an activity which is not really going on. What needs to be discussed is the city of London.”
"For every pound that Africa receives in aid it loses three pounds in tax avoidance" through British-based tax havens, said Donne.
This AP piece goes after the question of why so few U.S. nationals are among the people implicated in the Panama papers leak. Part of the answer, according to Mossack Fonseca co-founder Ramon Fonseca is that the firm doesn't really cater to Americans.
"My partner is German, and I lived in Europe, and our focus has always been the European and Latin American market," Fonseca said at his law office.
"He loves the U.S. a lot, and I do, too. My kids were educated there," Fonseca added. But "as a policy we prefer not to have American clients."
In this interview, Fusion journalist Alice Brennan also touches on the question of why so few Americans.
When we first got the data we searched and searched and searched for more U.S. names -- and we didn't come up with the same huge bombshells as our European partners. One very simple explanation for why there aren't more US names in the data is that they don't need to go to Panama! We have our very own tax havens here in the US in Nevada, Wyoming and Delaware. In fact Mossack Fonseca has offices in the US and some of their biggest scandals have used companies registered in these states... One of our academic experts also mentioned that many of the super rich Americans actually take their assets straight to Swiss banks and they don't need Panama.
And AFP went after the same topic in this piece.
"Americans have so many tax havens to choose from," said Nicholas Shaxson, author of "Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World," a 2011 book on secretive centers for hiding money.
Indeed, Americans do not have to go abroad to hide funds and activities behind anonymous corporations: They can create them at home.
Luke Harding of The Guardian has a massive long-form profile of Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm that has become the Pandora's Box of global capitalism.
Mossack Fonseca’s leaked emails reveal the extraordinary measures that some of its well-heeled clients took to keep their financial affairs secret. Especially the Europeans and Americans, who have latterly found themselves under scrutiny from their own governments.
One theme that emerges is anxiety. Wealthy individuals with “undeclared” offshore bank accounts are afraid they might get rumbled.
Another theme is victimhood. The superrich, it appears, feel they are being unfairly picked on – persecuted even.
In one 2014 email, Hangartner recounts a conversation with a contact who worked for Global Trust Advisors, a financial services firm based in Luxembourg.
The contact told him that her Italian clients were going to desperate lengths to avoid being caught: “She cited the reduction in [offshore] business was due to pressure from the Italian government chasing clients. She had heard that the fiscal authorities would look at what car you drive, if you go to Switzerland, etc so clients are scared.”
The head of the Reserve Bank of India, part of the Indian government's task force to probe local implications of the Panama papers, says it is "dangerous" to "talk about whether entrepreneurial wealth is illegitimate."
"The fact that there are occasions when people are found to be hiding their wealth as in the Panama allegations essentially contributes to this process of de-legitimization," RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan said.
It is worth remembering that the Panama papers, which represent only a tiny fraction of the money-laundering and tax-evasion problem, cover more than 210,000 companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions, and many thousands of individual beneficiaries.
Many Africans are hoping that the Panama papers will -- finally -- convince the world that corruption is not just an African problem. Here's an interview with economist Carl Manlan, head of the Africa Against Ebola Solidarity. In this bit, he is asked about a Ugandan company that seems to have used shell companies to avoid $400 million in taxes:
What does $400 million mean in someone's daily life when they cannot even get $2 a day?
People don't understand what it means that $400 million disappeared. We need to translate those numbers to the common man. How many people would have been treated for HIV? The treatment is about $100 a year, per person. For $400 million, that's a lot of people you can put on treatment.
The Independent has a piece on how the Panama papers leak got started and the fact that no one, not even the German journalists who have been in direct contact with the source, know his or her identity (at least, that is what they are saying).
More than a year after Doe first contacted them at their Munich-based newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Obermayer, 38, and Obermaier, 32, still have no idea who their source is or why he or she (or possibly they) came to them.
To protect Doe’s identity and safety, however, they remain purposely guarded about what they do know.
"We can’t disclose any numbers or times [of contact], of course, or if we are still in contact," Obermayer said in an exchange of emails on 6 April. "But we have communicated a lot, through different ways, all encrypted. On some days, I chatted more with the source than with my wife. We had a lot to talk about."
Salon also has a piece on the origin of the leak, noting that the source of most major leaks in the past quickly became known:
Readers of Panama Papers have just that one opening line — “I want to make these crimes public” — to explain the source’s motive, although as Sueddeutsche Zeitung and other outlets reporting on the story are required to explain, some uses for offshore accounts are perfectly legal; and, as many outlets have noted, Mossack Fonseca is just one cog in a giant industry supporting tax havens, key parts of which are in the United States.
BBC has another piece on the fact that average Russians just don't care about the Panama leak or about any allegations of corruption within the ruling elite of President Vladimir Putin. Their correspondent, Steve Rosenberg, had this exchange with a woman in Elektrostal, an industrial town about two hours from Moscow:
At a newspaper kiosk I ask sales assistant Nadezhda what she thinks of the Panama Papers, and claims of a money laundering ring close to the Kremlin.
"I have a very negative attitude… towards you!" Nadezhda replies.
"That's a pity," I respond, "I don't have a negative attitude towards you."
"It's nothing personal," explains Nadezhda. "You seem quite a decent person. It's your country I don't like and its scheming. All these 'investigations' are a waste of time and money. We know what you're up to."
Yesterday, RFE/RL had this video in which the montage of Russian "opinions" about the revelations speaks volumes with the single word "Nyet."
Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution has his own conspiracy-theory take on the Panama leaks. Putin says it was a CIA plot -- but what if it was really a Kremlin plan to rock global capitalism?
In sum, my thinking is that this could have been a Russian intelligence operation, which orchestrated a high-profile leak and established total credibility by “implicating” (not really implicating) Russia and keeping the source hidden. Some documents would be used for anti-corruption campaigns in a few countries—topple some minor regimes, destroy a few careers and fortunes. By then blackmailing the real targets in the United States and elsewhere (individuals not in the current leak), the Russian puppet masters get “kontrol” and influence.
If the Russians are behind the Panama Papers, we know two things and both come back to Putin personally: First, it is an operation run by RFM, which means it’s run by Putin; second, it’s ultimately about blackmail. That means the real story lies in the information being concealed, not revealed. You reveal secrets in order to destroy; conceal in order to control. Putin is not a destroyer. He’s a controller.