A schematic on money laundering:
Sympathy for Britain's prime minister?
Malta Today reports on the growing pressure on Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat stemming from the Panama Papers leak.
Although Joseph Muscat has now acknowledged the Panama scandal as a serious issue that threatens to undermine his own credibility, he is still clearly responding to the controversy in the traditional way politicians have always faced crises in this country.
Labour’s first response was to try and turn the tables on the Opposition, by dragging up corruption cases that surfaced during or after the Nationalist administration. Separately, the Prime Minister has also urged us to consider the ‘good things’ achieved under his administration: the reduction in utility bills, economic growth, record employment levels, civil liberties, etc.
All this indicates that Muscat has not yet understood the longer-term implications of this scandal. This is no longer a question of the ‘us against them’ style of politics we have grown accustomed to in Malta; nor can it be reduced to a minor blemish, to be counterbalanced by other achievements.
The Guardian today is writing about what kinds of results the Panama Papers leak might produce. Can it produce better dialogue and cooperation between developed and developing countries?
The Panama Papers offer empirical evidence of the cost of tax evasion, shedding light on a number of tax-related stories in Africa, including missing taxes from oil revenue in Uganda, secrecy surrounding diamond mining in Sierra Leone, and hidden players in Angola’s sovereign wealth fund.
Aggressive tax avoidance is not just a problem for developing countries. There is aheightened awareness in Europe and elsewhere of the millions lost because of complex tax deals and havens. The decade-defining refugee crisis, mainly due to the war in Syria, has also focused minds on international and domestic needs for additional financing.
Ryding says she has noticed more civil servants speaking in favour of an intergovernmental tax body, but the official EU position has not shifted.
Gizmodo looks at how Mossack Fonseca might have been hacked.
For a company good at hiding money, Mossack was apparently terrible at hiding data. Wordfence says Mossack’s emails were stored on the very same server that could be easily accessed through the Revolution Slider exploit—after uploading a short script to Mossack, the emails were there for the taking. It would be like keeping all your money in a single checking account and having your PIN be 1-2-3-4. Wordfence also claims that, until very recently, there was no firewall protecting Mossack’s site, a security measure that might have been able to stop or at least limit the amount of data that was leaked.
European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen says tax avoidance is "a cancer of market economies."
ICYMI, this commentary by Guardian economics journalist Aditya Chakrabortty from April 10 is getting a lot of social-media attention today.
But the risk is that all this will descend into a morass of semi-titillating detail: a string of revelations about who gave what to whom, and whether he or she then declared it to the Revenue. The story will become about “handling” and “narrative” and individual culpability. That will be entertaining for those who like to point fingers, perplexing for those too busy to engage in the detail – and miss the wider truth revealed by the leak which forced all this into public discussion.
Because at root, the Panama Papers are not about tax. They’re not even about money. What the Panama Papers really depict is the corruption of our democracy.
Al-Jazeera talks about how the Panama Papers leak is being covered, including comment from WikiLeaks's Julian Assange.
Here's a very interesting blast from the past, a 2015 piece in The Atlantic on the aggressive secrecy of the wealth-management world...
I was lucky that he merely threatened me. A journalist from Newsweek actually wasdeported from a different tax-haven island (Jersey) for her reporting there, and was banned from re-entering the island, or any part of the U.K., for nearly two years. Even though her story was unrelated to the financial-services industry, it was expected to bring negative publicity to the island, threatening its reputation as a place to do business. The message was therefore quashed by banishment of the messenger. The wealth-management industry does not mess around.
Wealth management is a profession on the defensive. Although many people have never heard of it, it is well known to both state revenue authorities and international agencies seeking to impose the rule of law on high-net-worth individuals. Those individuals—including the 103,000 people classified as “ultra-high-net-worth” based on having $30 million or more in investable assets—pay wealth-management professionals hefty fees to help them avoid taxes, debts, legal judgments, and other obligations the rest of the world considers part of everyday life. The general public doesn’t hear much about these professionals, since there are only a few of them worldwide (just under 20,000 belong to the main professional society) and they strive to keep a low profile, both for themselves and their clients.
