The world's biggest "offshore" tax heaven is not any of the Caribbean islands. It's not Switzerland. It's not Hong Kong.
It's South Dakota. [1]
Former hedge fund manager and financial book author Patrick Boyle explains what these Pandora Papers mean in a video [2].
There are rumors and speculations that both the Panama and Pandora Papers leaks were released by the CIA. The leak is so massive and so many entities were hacked that only a nation state could have pulled it off. And given who was and who wasn't implicated in this and given which news orgs received these papers, it's pretty obvious that CIA or NSA or some other part of the US IC community was behind these leaks. And none of the media companies are asking the question of who is behind these leaks for a very good reason.
Just imagine if Wikileaks had released something like this... all these news orgs would immediately blame it on "russians" and claim it's all fake.
It’s very clear that you don’t work with in infosec if you have it in your mind that hacking 14 offshore financial services company is indicative of nation state level activity.
The evidence isn’t that great for the claim you’re making. The other one I hear often when people make this claim which is how good a job the hackers did packaging it and getting it to all the right places in relative secrecy.
I mean.. I kind of see where your coming from if you compare it to the Epik hack recently but I don’t think quietly emailing journalists is some unobtainable skill either for even a single person let alone small crew.
I'm pretty familiar with the Panama Papers, but didn't know much about the underlying exfiltration.
Luckily, Wired did an expose of Mossack Fonseca's security lapses in 2018, and yeah, wow – if any of this is evidence of their broader security patterns at the time of the breach, you definitely would not have needed a team of Fancy Bear hackers to pull this one off:
> Mossack Fonseca has failed to update its Outlook Web Access login since 2009
> Mossack Fonseca's client portal is also vulnerable to the DROWN attack... The portal, which runs on the Drupal open source CMS, was last updated in August 2013
> The version of Drupal used by the portal has at least 25 vulnerabilities, including a high-risk SQL injection vulnerability that allows anyone to remotely execute arbitrary commands. Areas of the portal's backend can also be accessed by guessing the URL structure
> Mossack Fonseca's emails were also not encrypted [and] the company did not use the TLS security protocol
That all being said, of course none of this means it wasn't a nation state! It definitely could have been – the incentives were certainly there. But to call it "obviously" the job of state-employed hackers seems wrong.
I second this. As someone who works in infosec, there are ransomware gangs sitting on dozens after dozens companies' networks idle because they can't get enough people to get to them and do the manual work in time. On average it takes them like a day before they start lateral movement. These are not sophisticated elite hackers.
If I had to guess the number of individuals that can pull of a sophisticated attack (0 day, at least develop exploit from a cve report/patch, target specific implant/c2, knowledge of how to evade enterprise EDRs) is in the hundreds if not thousands. Most of them don't work for governments.
Ransomware actors get caught because naturally their attack is meant to be discovered. If they decided to silently drop implants everywhere, how many companies do you think can afford to pay for forensics/IR at a massive scale, even if an intrusion is found?
Also, who said it was a hack? It could have been an employee that obtained enough access to get the docs and avoid audit logging.
I do think it is interesting how journalists will alternate between finding severe ethical problems with signal boosting hackers and waving around dirty laundry like a flag.
> And given who was and who wasn't implicated in this and given which news orgs received these papers, it's pretty obvious that CIA or NSA or some other part of the US IC community was behind these leaks.
That’s a pretty bold conclusion from the premises provided.
Did that happen? I am not from the US, so I don't know, but here in Europe it always seemed clear that all leaks by WikiLeaks were genuine. People were discussing whether it's good to leak such stuff but the authenticity was not in doubt.
I think the OP was kind of caricaturing what are some valid criticisms of Wikileaks.
The four main ones I think have been they were accused of selectively releasing things in a way that looked awfully political. They just so happened to line up with a bunch of political statements Julian Assange had made in private chats that were later leaked.
The second one was that the way in which they went about providing active support in getting some of their documents from sources went way beyond all previously recognised standards of journalism.
Third one of the things that did ultimately come out of the DNC leak they were a part of was that some of the documents were altered from the originals and so they were “mostly real” but did have fake things in them. The reason for that was that it was an intelligence operation by the Russians that was specifically designed to throw the election at the last minute.
Understandably people were a bit upset by this and began to ask a lot of questions focusing on at what point were Wikileaks aware that this was an intelligence operation and I don’t think there are good answers for that still to this day.
The fourth main one is that they have been historically irresponsible with how they have released information and it likely got innocent people killed or put in jail.
So overall I think there’s a bit of a question of do they act differently behind closed doors that isn’t consistent with their public image because there is at least some evidence of that now.
On the first, it's not really strange to think people with documents to leak would look for an outlet that shares their political opinions. The "selective" leaks accusations are largely unfounded, with the one example given having been refused as much of the data had already been leaked.
On the second,you're referring to the supposed hacking claim in the indictment. Even if the accusations are true, the "hacking" provided no additional documents. You can take issue with Assange's action there, but all the documents were acquired by regular journalism standards.
I'd also like a source on the third one. Not someone discussing it, evidence of doctored documents.
And the fourth is just untrue. While Wikileaks was going through the documents, the Guardian published the decryption key in a book.
Your claim that their later releases included too much personal info is true, but that didn't kill people and it happened when Assange was trapped in the embassy unable to create the kind of vetting team.
> Third one of the things that did ultimately come out of the DNC leak they were a part of was that some of the documents were altered from the originals and so they were “mostly real” but did have fake things in them. The reason for that was that it was an intelligence operation by the Russians that was specifically designed to throw the election at the last minute.
Looking around, it seems screenshots of one document were marked 'confidential', the original documents without that were available, and media turned that into "Russia edited the documents". Is there any other evidence? I can't find it.
> Third one of the things that did ultimately come out of the DNC leak they were a part of was that some of the documents were altered from the originals and so they were “mostly real” but did have fake things in them. The reason for that was that it was an intelligence operation by the Russians that was specifically designed to throw the election at the last minute.
This isn't a valid criticism of Wikileaks. If the Russians were responsible - and there was so much later-discredited bullshit kicked up about hypothetical Russians in 2016 I'm not taking that at face value - but if they were they could just have posted up a big torrent somewhere to the same overall effect.
> The four main ones I think have been they were accused of selectively releasing things in a way that looked awfully political.
Others have addressed the other points, I just want to note the hypocrisy of the journalists making these claims, as if media outlets would never present facts in a partisan way or exhibit any kind of political bias. It's laughable on its face.
"Essentially" seems to suggest that the media didn't literally publish the key. So let's be literal: Luke Harding, who is employed by The Guardian, published (not "leaked") the key, in a book published by - The Guardian.
I just want to make it clear that the source itself isn’t a YouTube video here but that this video happens to have an incredibly well respected person from the industry addressing that particular topic that might help provide context.
If the video is not the actual source, why not link the actual source? I certainly have a bigger hate of videos than normal, as any kind of research into them requires far more work than proper text, so I’d be happy to get anything that can be more easily verified.
For the second point, according to the article it was pretty minor stuff where what The Guardian did was far worse.
> And given who was and who wasn't implicated in this and given which news orgs received these papers, it's pretty obvious that CIA or NSA or some other part of the US IC community was behind these leaks.
Maybe a little bit too obvious? Or maybe that is what "they" want us to believe. Or in short: It is an obvious possibility, nothing proven.
> "the effect of the Pandora Papers is to, deservedly, trash a suite of non-US tax havens"
> "Who benefits? The US and the Big Four"
I'm a bit confused as I read this article as my understanding was that the Pandora Papers, for once, shed light on how the US is becoming the place of choice for the super rich seeking to escape taxation:
According to the article the ICIJ is just releasing parts of the leaked papers that do not mention the big four or people that avoid tax within US boundaries. Therefore, the big four have some kind of immunity and are the only safe place for the mega wealthy to avoid tax.
It’s not even a case of “for once”. It’s made abundantly clear if you’ve read or watched The Laundromat which was written by a core contributor to the ICIJ that significant tax evasion is happening in America.
I don't know what he's talking about when he says that only 1% of the ICIJ gets is made public. They published everything they had from previous leaks as far as I know. See here
The current data leak is a bunch of unprocessed files and emails that would be irresponsible to leak as it could contain private information such as passport scans of no public utility. They said they are in the process of cleaning that data to later make it available.
> The current data leak is a bunch of unprocessed files and emails that would be irresponsible to leak as it could contain private information such as passport scans of no public utility.
It will be very responsible to do so to people who have absolutely no reason to hide their wealth, especially in countries without public security problems. It is very morally correct too.
If you steal the Coca Cola recipe and release it, don't you think you'd be acting illegally? These documents were stolen from law firms, trust managers and accounting firms.
Aside from the fact that many of these structures are not illegal, and are often declared to local tax authorities of the resident, these are private matters. Plenty of money is laundered through onshore jurisdictions as well -- this has nothing to do with the entities itself.
If you steal anything you are acting illegally. If OTOH you obtain the secret recipe legally, and release that, there's no crime or tortious act.
> These documents were stolen
We don't actually know how they were obtained. But given that they were obtained at all, I'd say that the custodian of that data was the principal guilty party.
Why would the Pandora Papers leaker give it to the institution that had a precedent for censoring leaks in the past? If any leakers are reading this, please consider seeding a torrent from a burner phone and posting magnet links to 4chan/reddit, let them do the sifting and seeding.
Much less work, and I guarantee that it'll be far more effective than whatever they've been doing so far.
> please consider seeding a torrent from a burner phone and posting magnet links to 4chan/reddit, let them do the sifting and seeding
This is bad advice.
It guarantees the leaker will be denied whistleblower privileges and presumptions. It also ensures the leaked material will be useless for legislators, regulators and law enforcers.
Yes, doing zero editorial work and dumping on 4chan will spice up your corner of the web for a minute. But if you want to cause real change, you need to be more disciplined.
Is there less espionage going on now than before Snowden? Very few people outside the tech world care about privacy, if they even really understand it.
You’re assuming the leakers actually want indiscriminate exposure. For all we know, damaging the Tax Avoidance B Team and politically cherry-picked persons could be a shared goal of the leakers (hackers?), ICIJ, and “global media partners”.
That's a scenario I considered but the size of the document trove made me think it was unedited, without much real knowledge of what it contained beyond its origin. Perhaps it is the goal of ICIJ and Co., though, I can believe that.
> "The uber-rich in the United States tend to pay such low tax rates that they have less incentive to seek offshore havens. But their absence from the files also may mean that very wealthy Americans turn to different offshore jurisdictions."
Hell, the person who used to be president was paying that or less. They have at least 60% of congress paid for in order to not raise taxes or close loopholes as well. Then you have so many otherwise smart people believing that taxation is theft, when they're just not rich enough to pay the good rates.
This is the case of "Buy, Borrow, Die" or "kick the can". The top 0.01% paying a lower percentage of taxes than even the lower tax bracket worker class.
If you are a wharever-ionaire you could put your gains in index S&P 500 shares, then use them as collateral, paying everything you need with credit and having a $1 annual salary. So technically, that $1 it's their only income to the IRS. But what about interest? with that collateral, you have a special rate close to (or even lower than) inflation. Then you die, the bank takes your shares to pay your debt, and that's it.
Nobody who uses this strategy will come even close to spending every dollar that they earned, they spend all they want yet still end up leaving all their wealth to their kids when they die.
The FT runs a magazine called "How To Spend It" with ideas for what cheeky stylish thing to buy this month after you already spent it on what you want to. That this is apparently a lucrative business possibly tells you that you can max out your quality of life and still have money leftover.
Really depends, I can see a lot of quality of life on leaving family set for the next few centuries. And a lot of headache on managing the next personal island.
And of course it's more nuanced than that, with stuff like accelerated depreciation, preferential tax rates on investment income, charitable lead annuity trusts, etc. ad infinitum.
No, they give their wealth to their family as gifts, and they have no capital gains because they were living like a royalty off of loans leveraged against their assets and so their effective gains are zero, among other tricks. It's easy for the rich to avoid taxes.
This isn’t a criticism of your comment, but I have always thought it was funny that devout practitioners of those religions seem to find ways of technically adhering to those rules while at the same time completely flouting the spirit of them. See “Heter Iska and other evasions” here
> The funny part to me is believing in an all-powerful and omnipotent god whom you can nonetheless fool with semantics and shuffling papers.
There's no fooling going on. There's just faith traditions that believe God, either generally or for specific subsets of the overall rule set, is extremely concerned with the letter of the rules and not what humans might infer the spirit to be from the letter. That is, the rules are the rules, not an imperfect approximation serving some higher but difficult to express set of rules.
> but I have always thought it was funny that devout practitioners of those religions seem to find ways of technically adhering to those rules while at the same time completely flouting the spirit of them.
For example, the Quran explicitly calls out the behavior of a tribe of Jews who, to tried to avoid the prohibition of fishing on the Sabbath: https://quran.com/7/163
We also have explicit texts in Hadith that call out and reprimand attempts to bypass usury by buying an item in installments, then selling it back to the original seller for a lower cash price. The effective transaction being a money for money contract with a disposable item in the middle. All this is prohibited.
You will not find a single Muslim scholar say that it is ok for a woman to wear a wig instead of a headscarf, even though technically she is still covering her hair.
There was a discussion about this in the Netherlands. Ultimately it was concluded that Jesus was less important than the future of the nation. And these people were 100% orthodox protestants. Quantitative easing is just too good like that.
And now people cry about financial inequality. Sometimes the easy things out have long term consequences. We've living those consequences today across the globe.
You should read about the step up in basis loophole that happens when you die. That's the biggest one I'm aware of where your estate doesn't pay taxes after death that you would have owed in life. I'm sure there are many others I'm not aware of, but this is one everyone should know about.
Yes, every single piece of it is taxed. But a lot of people really don’t want you to think it is. Apparently a couple of articles about the calendar years in which some billionaire didn’t pay very much tax did the trick on the parent commenter.
That’s what the talk radio shills and similar right wing folks tell you.
The reality is that when you have enough cash to justify, you roll your assets into a series of South Dakota trusts and that money is perpetually tax-free.
Another tactic is to use Nevada and Delaware corporations to buy real property everywhere, and use that to avoid most taxation.
The exotic trust structures talked about here are money laundering structures, which exist because gullible voters are duped with tales of widows losing houses and farm families losing the mythical family farm. There’s a reason why the home base for this is a state with weird banking laws where there’s more cattle than people.
Mitt Romney’s (I point him out because of his fame in this regard, he’s not unique or alone) great-great-grandchildren will be living off some untaxed trust 150 years from now when we’re all dead.
Not sure if worse than his descendants living tax free hundreds of years for now, is having his image whitewashed for his "bullwark against Trump" that weirdly only manifested in the latter part of his term.
That article is misleading - there are no scenarios where a billionaire is going to withdraw their wealth as income where it might be subject to an income tax. Of course the amount of income tax they pay is tiny and comparable to a multi-millionaire. That is the level of income where all their material wants are met.
Even ignoring taxes why would anyone ever want to get paid billions dollars in a direct cash transfusion? Nothing they would be buying regularly costs that much!
They should be leading with how much of the tax burden the billionaires are responsible for shouldering, not how much they are shouldering via one specific tax that isn't there to tax them. Income tax isn't for business owners, it is for people who earn an income!
Sure, but then all their real estate, cars, etc is also there and tied to a business. They never have to take money out for any reason, and if they do it’s just forever rolling over low interest loans. Besides, the money amount never goes down unless there’s a big crash.
Don't know how it works in the US but here if you own property or cars etc. through business you can't use them for personal reasons and if you get audited this is considered tax evasion. I would be surprised if the US is any different.
This is very much like the speed limit on highways.
You can't put a private investigator on the tail of every business owner.
Personal expenses will be justified as business expenses, it's a matter of catching the very big and obvious cases, doing it so very publicly with the help of the press and try to scare all the other business owners in order to scale down the amount of personal expenses that they claim as business expenses
But the non-obvious cases will also be the one where only a fraction of the assets in personal use will be owned by the business. Depending on the size of the fraction it might very well be not much different than what regular people do (eg using a company laptop to watch YouTube at home).
They don't pay tax because they don't earn any money. When they sell assets they pay capital gains like everyone else. Then it's taxed when they die at a hell of a lot higher than single digits.
Not saying system is perfect but exaggerating the problem is definitely not the best way to fix it.
I genuinely wonder what would be the best way to deal with the unrealized gains + taking out loans as untaxable income loophole. It seems like the current Democratic party strategy would be taxing unrealized gains over a certain amount but that still doesn't quite feel right..
Possibly: tax the interest on those loans at the bank. Possibly count such loans against assets (reducing banks' lending capability).
I'm not positive this works out, but:
- Banks tend to be well-established, identifiable entities.
- They are highly regulated and audited.
The question I'm not certain of the answer is what the result of such a tax would be. I suspect such loans would tend to be crowded out or inerest rates increased (raising costs to the billionaire utilising this cash-out option).
This seems to me along the lines of an HFT transaction tax, possibly operating similarly.
Alternatively, tax consumption over a certain threshold as though spending is income. Effectively instate a federal sales tax after one has spent $X dollars.
> Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos paid a true tax rate of 0.98% as his wealth grew by a staggering $99 billion between 2014 and 2018; he reported just $4.22 billion in reported income during the same period.
I'm curious how I should rationalize that this is not in fact a giant loophole for billionaires. Bezos' wealth increased immensely such that he is now one of the richest people in the world, and yet his effective tax rate is far lower than anything you or I will ever see. If he needs "income", he can simply take out a low interest loan with his stock as collateral to pay for whatever he needs (yachts, spurious lawsuits against NASA, etc.). His stock is effectively cash, loans effectively "realize" his gains, and yet we don't treat any of it as income.
There's a vast difference between the unrealized gains of not-filthy-rich people with 401ks / middling stock portfolios and the unrealized gains of filthy rich people who primarily take stock as income (which they do for the exact purpose of paying lower taxes).
First, you can look at "true tax rate", which has nothing to do with how taxes are calculated (as described in your linked article).
.98% sounds like he paid just under 1 billion on 4.22 billion of reported income (or just under 25%). I guess it sucks to be Bezos, because he spent more in one year on taxes than I'll have to pay in my life.. I'm going to go out on a limb and suspect that figure is not AGI, but total income. I suspect he had many deductible expenses like donations to charity, though 25% isn't that low since the top marginal bracket for capital gains is 20%.
I guess I'm curious how he paid so much in taxes...
I mean I don't know what to say here - the whole entire point here is that he makes a fuck ton more than his reported income and should (probably somehow) pay taxes on that. This graph IMO shows pretty clearly how not optimal the current tax system is: https://i.imgur.com/jcO8KgO.png
Taxing capital gains at nark-to-market values, with a flat rate (maybe 20-25%) and without exemptions or deductibles would go a long way towards fiscal equity.
The concept of “capital gains” in the U.S. is a joke, unless you buy stock directly from the company, or buy when the company goes public, there is no capital investment. Once the company sells stock to the public, further purchase or sale of stock is nothing more than buying/selling goods. When I buy stock on the stock market the company doesn’t get the money, the person who sells me the stock gets the money, and that’s not capital investment.
Sale of stock should be taxed at each states tax rate, because it’s the buying and selling of a good, it’s not capital investment.
I believe "taxation is theft" out of moral and ethical reasons. It's not something I just pulled out of nowhere because I don't like paying taxes.
The problem here is as always the government, which is not doing as much as we'd like and has supposedly gotten captured by bad individuals. We can't have our cake and eat it.
And despite being against taxation I'm all for flat or proportional taxation, while we have it. This whole mess arguably came about because we wanted the ability to make the rich pay more than the rest of us, and then while we were at it decided to use taxation to manipulate the behavior of the public. And look how it turned out, the market spoke and found optimal solutions around taxation, and unfortunately it only works for the wealthy. It's like shaking our fists at the sky because the rain caused a lake and mosquitos bred there.
Would you still think taxation is theft if the government was acting as a responsible steward of tax money, and spending it in ways that improve the lives of the citizenry without running up a huge debt?
Ideally it would be spending an amount of money that individuals can also afford to spend themselves, that'd be the fairest, but that hardly ever happens...
Like with a lot of things it's more of a spectrum than a binary. Yes it still would be "theft". But if they were responsible with it then I'd definitely be more okay with it(like a lot of libertarians) . It'd be more okay if we all paid proportionally to our earnings. It'd also be more okay if we had more and more granular controls over what it gets spent on (like the humble bundle where I'd pick which ratio of my share of gov spending goes to which department or social good).
The thing that irritates me about it is that none of these intermediate steps seem to get any traction. My pet theory about that is they don't get implemented because they would inevitably lead to full public control over social spending. And when we get there we're essentially doing libertarianism anyways and realise we are responsible for our neighbours and society and have no need for a government that does stuff without our consent.
Taxes are not the evil gobernmint coming to "steal" the money you made alone. It's a price for living in a society that enabled you to make the money in the first place.
By all means, I'm in favour that anyone can voluntarily opt-out of the social contract and go live in a cabin in the woods unmolested. But if you don't, then you need to pay taxes and obey laws.
> "ProPublica estimates that as a result, the U.S. is losing at least $18 billion dollars in revenue each year. In a letter to Congress, Rettig told Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon that he and the agency are well aware that it would be far more lucrative and productive to pursue tax fraud and evasion of the wealthiest Americans, but without Congress restoring its budget, there's no way to make that happen."
I have no doubt that $18 billion figure is wildly underestimated. In Ireland we lose at least 10 billion euro a year to tax evasion by the wealthiest, with only 5 million people.
One reason why low income tax payers are so commonly audited is due to the earned income tax credit (EITC). It’s a direct cash transfers from the government to low income earners and easily abused.
Direct cash transfers to low income earners are exactly what America needs. Inequality is at record levels, because the whole economic and justice system is ridiculously rigged.
The EITC helped 28 million families at an estimated net cost of 17% of $70 billion - 12 billion dollars [0]. That's quite a bit less than the at least 18 billion easily recoupable, as mentioned.
If the EITC is abused, then by all means fund the IRS so they can fight the abuse (which they seem to be doing already).
And again - it helped 28 million families, rather than some oily tax accountant, offshore goons, and private jet company shareholders. I'd like to see America start punching up instead of down - it's really the countries only hope of being somewhere worth raising children in.
If it were "abused" by 100% of filers, it would almost be a UBI. Which would be a good thing. (It would be even better if the procedure for receiving it were "be a human living in USA", rather than submitting complicated bureaucratic forms on a particular schedule.) The problem with EITC and other similar benefits such as those instituted temporarily in response to Covid pandemic is that such benefits invariably have complicated means tests. Without that, not only would IRS examiners have more time to go after the big evaders, not only would more of the "deserving poor" actually receive the benefit, but also it would be great for the economy.
I think he intended the whataboutism part around assange as guilt by implication - does that count?
In any case, he buried the lede at the very end of the story, after briefly mentioning in the beginning that he worked with the director of the program:
“
Who is calling the shots? One man apparently, Gerard Ryle. In the wake of the Panama Papers, when we asked Ryle on a number of occasions for an ICIJ log-in to analyse the data, we were denied.
“My path, my call,” said Ryle. We already have our media partners, he said.
“
This reads more like his feelings were hurt by not being included.
"Yet spy services are increasingly using a WikiLeaks-like model of posting stolen materials online. In 2018, the Trump administration granted the CIA aggressive new secret authorities to undertake the same sort of hack-and-dump operations for which Russian intelligence has used WikiLeaks. Among other actions, the agency has used its new powers to covertly release information online about a Russian company that worked with Moscow’s spy apparatus."
So, now the CIA can use "hack-and-dump operations". So, now so when I see a big "hack-and-dump operations" with 0 results about the US, it is - at least - a bit suspicious.
The truth is: all these leaks didn't unearth as much dirt on high-profile politicians as the journalists hoped for. Also, the "Swiss bank accounts" seem to have become a Hollywoood clichée that do not have much practical relevance any more. The biggest problem we have regarding taxes is an overly complicated tax code with too many legal loopholes.
Yep. The reality is that tax avoidance may be immoral, it is perfectly legal. I pass the skyscrapers filled with lawyers and accountants every day on my commute.
> The truth is: all these leaks didn't unearth as much dirt on high-profile politicians as the journalists hoped for.
I don’t think that’s true. Significant corruption has been found in this and previous leaks at multiple levels of government around the globe. The problem is not enough has been done about it.
For those curious on the source - Michael West is a former stockbroker turned financial journalist for major Australian newpapers, who started his own independent media company after being axed by them.
According to a study [1] from the University of Oxford, "147 distinct outcomes recorded for
the Panama Papers investigation over 35 months", summarized as:
"""
• The most reliable outcome of Panama Papers
reporting around the world has been various forms
of official deliberation and information-gathering,
observed in 45 percent of countries tracked in this
study.
• Nearly a fifth of countries tracked have seen at
least one instance of concrete reform, such as a
new law or policy designed to address problems
exposed in the reporting. This is a higher rate than
has been found in comparable analyses, due in
part to the global scope of the Panama Papers and
the nature of the institutions implicated.
• Various tax enforcement measures have been a
regular outcome of the reporting, and numerous
companies and individuals have been penalised
or prosecuted as a result. Direct accountability for
public officials remains rare, with officials losing
office in fewer than 10 percent of countries tracked.
• Backlash against journalists was recorded almost
as often as substantive reforms, though in
different parts of the world: predictably, reporters
have come under threat in countries that score
low in press freedom.
"""
This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INRs9rnciyI0 ) illuminates some of the biases that these leaks have this time around. I feel this sort of leak is more about attention grabbing media bites, than a thirst for real change. And i would guess that this leak potentially harms more people than it saves.
I am surprised that no one here has stated the obvious, that the release of information on big participants in the USA _could_ be released next. The summary page at the Guardian says "What has been revealed so far?" That implies that more may be revealed. If I was going to out the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world I'd take the time to get my facts straight and investigate all the legal angles.
Also since this is a distributed project some reporters may be taking longer to dig into their sub-projects.
Corporate secrecy laws in Delaware are so strong that Americans don’t need to seek offshore tax havens, which themselves are often modelled on Delaware’s corporate laws.
The question which always comes to mind when some "papers" are released allegedly revealing how bad our politicians and other leaders are...why are we all so much better off than our ancestors just a hundred years ago? Less war, less famines, more quality of life, more personal freedom, improving standards in the "3rd world", scientific breakthroughs, etc.?
Labor organization, environmental regulations, freely distributed vaccines, public education, trust busting, utility regulation, public infrastructure, public scientific investment, increased democratic participation. But I assume you were thinking capitalism?
Has anybody said anything about the source of these leaks? From what I understand they come from multiple (14?) off shore service providers. Were those all compromised by the same perpetrator? Quite a feat. How can we know the data wasn't filtered before reaching the ICIJ?
What about the legality of this? Every decent person seems to love these types of leaks while admitting there's nothing inherently illegal going on. Does that mean it's nothing more than "celebrity secrets exposed"? With elected officials you could make the case that they should be held accountable but what about people who never held or no longer hold office?
What argument justifies that all this dirty laundry should be exposed? Is it morally correct to hack my neighbor's email and expose the fact he didn't declare his taxes properly, or is there some kind of threshold that should be applied?
I wonder if it's possible to automate the offshoring of financial assets with the same structure that the Pandora+Panama papers lay out. Folks who aren't quite "wealthy" but still have wealth they'd like to shelter from regulating authorities would then be able to take advantage of the same loopholes. Perhaps then there would be incentive to close the loopholes.
On a more meta note I find that many HN posts (including this one) follows Betteridge's Law of Headlines (1) and is obviously clickbait. Why would this be upvoted? What relevance does this have to do with "[something] that good hackers would find interesting" (per HN guidelines)?
Nothing is going to come off this. Nothing will change. That’s the world we live in: get rich then sell ways to grow it at all costs and hide it from the tax man
I've also given up on humanity. Feels like I'm forced to live inside a zoo, and all the low iq apes are convinced they are changing the world by picking up banana peels.
It's South Dakota. [1]
Former hedge fund manager and financial book author Patrick Boyle explains what these Pandora Papers mean in a video [2].
There are rumors and speculations that both the Panama and Pandora Papers leaks were released by the CIA. The leak is so massive and so many entities were hacked that only a nation state could have pulled it off. And given who was and who wasn't implicated in this and given which news orgs received these papers, it's pretty obvious that CIA or NSA or some other part of the US IC community was behind these leaks. And none of the media companies are asking the question of who is behind these leaks for a very good reason.
Just imagine if Wikileaks had released something like this... all these news orgs would immediately blame it on "russians" and claim it's all fake.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/heres-how-states-like-south-...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INRs9rnciyI