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 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.
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.”
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.
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.Russian cartoonist Sergei Yolkin on the Russian cellist who invests in Panama.
Robert Palmer, a campaigner for the anticorruption NGO Global Witness, talks in this TED video about the impact of the Panama leak and his optimism that that it can lead to real change.
"For us at Global Witness, this is a moment for change," Palmer says. "We need ordinary people to get angry at the way in which people can hide their identity behind secret companies. We need business leaders to stand up and say, 'secrecy like this is not good for business.'"
U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has temporary political asylum in Russia, has taken to Twitter to urge British Prime Minister David Cameron to resign because of the Panama papers revelations.
The Independent covers Snowden's tweets.
It's funny because it's true?
The Financial Times proves that setting up an offshore company is sooooo simple that even a journalist can do it.
The Seychelles option caught my eye, mostly because it had one of the loosest requirements for paperwork. Costing just £335, it also had no residency requirement, no need to file annual accounts, no tax and promised confidentiality as a “key feature”. Would they really just let me have it? “I think I will go for the Seychelles company,” I said. “OK sir, I will put that in your online shopping basket right now,” replied Emily, asking me to transfer the money via the website.