It turns out that for a plurality of respondents in this poll, the Panama Papers has not harmed their image of politicians:
Iceland Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson says he will not resign over Panama Papers revelations that he had a stake in an offshore firm between 2005 and 2010. Last week, Prime Minister David Gunnlaugsson resigned over revelations about him.
Iceland's Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson said on Tuesday he would not resign over the Panama Papers leaks, which showed he was once had a stake in an offshore investment firm in the Seychelles.
Asked by reporters in London whether he would quit, Benediktsson answered: "No".
Drew Sullivan of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which is one of the lead organizations on the Panama Papers stories, writes for Foreign Policy magazine that despite great successes, organizations like his "face an existential threat."
But many organizations like ours face an existential threat — a toxic brew of stagnant economies, politically oriented advertising dollars, hostile governments and laws, and other problems. And that’s before getting to the fundamental problem: investigative reporting has never been a profitable business and has always relied on some big brother media to support it.
In many developing countries, media outlets that do investigative journalism survive only with the help of Western governments, the Open Society Foundations, a few other non-profit foundations, and little else. Even then, of all the development money spent abroad, journalism accounts for just 1 percent. And of that, investigative reporting receives only 2 to 3 percent, according to numbers from the Center for Independent Media Assistance.
U.K. human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson spoke with RFE/RL after the Panama Papers scandal broke. Among the things he said:
"[The] message of the Panama Papers is that governments have been slow and they are being defeated by clever lawyers and accountants and they need to act to have more forceful and onerous laws against tax avoidance."
This New York Times stories focuses on the lawyers and asks the question: "Has the legal profession lost its moral compass?"
The answer is that the ethical rules governing lawyers do not put much of a barrier in the way of helping clients engage in transactions that would appear questionable but do not violate any specific laws, so it is not clear whether lawyers pushing to the edge of the law are acting improperly.
Model Rule of Professional Conduct 1.2(d), issued by the American Bar Association, says that a lawyer should “not counsel a client to engage, or assist a client in conduct that the lawyer knows is criminal or fraudulent.”
Note how the rule is premised on the lawyer’s knowledge, and many lawyers are expert at keeping themselves ignorant about exactly what is taking place to maintain plausible deniability. Moreover, that same rule says that “a lawyer may discuss the legal consequences of any proposed course of conduct,” so exploring the limits of the law can be permissible.
With all the hoopla about the Panama Papers in recent days, you may have overlooked this April 7 report by Citizens for Tax Justice, a U.S. nongovernmental organization, on how U.S. countries have stashed hundreds of billions of dollars in tax havens in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes.
The U.S. allows its corporations to defer paying U.S. corporate income taxes on profits of their offshore subsidiaries until those profits are officially “repatriated” (officially brought to the U.S.). This creates an incentive for American corporations to engage in accounting gimmicks to make their U.S. profits appear to be earned in countries where they will not be taxed. These data demonstrate that this is happening on a large scale. In fact, American corporations reported that more than half a trillion dollars of their profits were earned, for tax purposes, in the 10 tax haven countries shown in the table.
Amazingly, some lawmakers have, in recent years, called for even greater tax breaks for the offshore profits of American corporations. Some proposals would largely exempt previously accumulated offshore profits from U.S. taxes on an (allegedly) one-time basis (often called a “repatriation holiday”). Others would provide a permanent exemption (often called a “territorial tax system”). Perhaps these lawmakers do not realize that over half of the profits that American corporations claim their subsidiaries earn offshore — over half of the profits that could benefit from such new tax breaks — are reported by the companies to have been earned in 10 obvious tax havens.
Newsweek has this rundown of the African politicians who figure in the Panama Papers stories.
Koji Annan, the son of former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, who allegedly used an offshore company incorporated in the Pacific island of Niue to buy a $500,000 central London apartment. A lawyer for Annan said that his companies “operate in accordance with the laws and regulations of the relevant jurisdictions” and paid whatever taxes they were liable to.
The Daily Beast has found that the Swiss law firm that "played an integral role in the transfer of some $2 billion from a close circle of friends and associates of Vladimir Putin" has long-standing ties with the so-called Klyuev group -- which has been described as a "dangerous transnational criminal organization."
Members of the Klyuev Group have been sanctioned by the U.S. government under a law named for its most high-profile victim: Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. In 2007 and 2008, Magnitsky uncovered a $230 million tax fraud allegedly perpetrated by ex-convictDmitry Klyuev and his confederates, which included state tax officials and Interior Ministry investigators. Magnitsky was then framed by the very men he exposed; he was beaten to death in a Moscow prison hospital in 2009.
Documents seen by The Daily Beast show that on April 13, 2011, Altem Invest Ltd., a Cyprus-registered company controlled by Dmitry Klyuev, transferred $4,499 into a Swiss bank account belonging to Dietrich, Baumgartner & Partner. The law firm has also represented Vladlen Stepanov in a money laundering case opened in 2011 by the Swiss attorney general in relation to the Magnitsky affair. Stepanov, said to be a member of the Klyuev Group, is the ex-husband of Olga Stepanova, who formerly headed Moscow Tax Office No. 28, which processed part of the fraudulent $230 million refund.
Oxfam on the link between the Panama Papers revelations and global poverty: