The Panama Papers

[Czero 101]

From "What Are The Panama Papers?"

http://www.techinsid...a-papers-2016-4

An obscure law firm in Central America is the source of what's being called the largest information leak in history.

Emails and documents reveal how the world's richest and most powerful, from Vladimir Putin to the prime minister of Iceland, hide their business dealings using offshore tax havens and shell companies.

For the past year, hundreds of journalists from around the world secretly analyzed terabytes of data uncovered from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm with offices around the world. Their findings were collectively published on April 3 as the Panama Papers.

How did this all start?

About a year ago, an anonymous source contacted German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung with data from Mossack Fonseca, a relatively unknown law firm based in Panama that specializes in creating shell companies. These shell companies are held in countries with strict privacy laws and used to obfuscate business dealings.

Süddeutsche Zeitung partnered with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and over one hundred media partners to parse and report on the leaked data. Those media partners include the likes of the BBC and The Guardian.

What's part of the leak?

The Panama Papers constitute more leaked data than the Wikileaks Cablegate, Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks, and Swiss Leaks combined, according to Süddeutsche Zeitung. That makes this data leak the largest in recorded history with:

• 2.6 terabytes of data from Mossack Fonseca's founding in 1977 to December 2015
  
• 11.5 million documents, including email correspondence and legal contracts
  
• 214,000 shell companies used by 12 country leaders, 128 public officials, and 29 Forbes-listed billionaires
  

What are the implications?

The wider implications of the Panama Papers have yet to be felt. What's been initially published focuses heavily on money traced back to Russian president Vladimir Putin and Iceland prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson.

Media outlets with access to the Panama Papers will likely publish more of their findings in the coming days and weeks.

There's also a video that summarizes some parts of this story...

Cz

Edited April 4, 2016 by Czero 101

[bubblykiss]

Rich people worked extra hard not to pay their taxes.

I find this assertion completely unbelievable.

Wealthy people hate money.

[Likely Guy]

Rich people worked extra hard not to pay their taxes.

I find this assertion completely unbelievable.

Wealthy people hate money.

You broke my sarcasm meter . You owe me a new one.

[Sir Wearer of Hats]

800 Australians on that list - what's the bet they're all politicians and Gina Rhinehart?

[Peter B]

800 Australians on that list - what's the bet they're all politicians and Gina Rhinehart?

Funnily enough, IIRC I saw an article a week or two ago which quoted the Australian Tax Office as saying that her company paid more tax than any other entity in Australia.

The list of people and organisations paying little or no tax featured a lot of people with fairly low public profiles, even though they were incredibly rich.

[kartikg]

I would have done the same if I was that rich.

[Farmer77]

Apparently we wont have the pleasure of getting the whole story from the "panama papers" thanks to corporate media: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/04/corporate-media-gatekeepers-protect-western-1-from-panama-leak/

[Aftermath]

Rich people worked extra hard not to pay their taxes.

I find this assertion completely unbelievable.

Wealthy people hate money.

You broke my sarcasm meter . You owe me a new one.

Not only that, but that level of sarcasm is: illegal in 13 states and made my head hurt.

[Czero 101]

Bernie Sanders discussing the problems with the Panama Free Trade Agreement in October 2011 and in essence predicting what we are now seeing with the Panama Papers...

Cz

[flyingswan]

I would have done the same if I was that rich.

Which makes you just as selfish as they are.

The rich benefit more than most from living in a society that is stabilised by government spending as they have more to lose. They like having defence, police and a legal system obviously, but welfare spending also helps them, as without it the poor could well be rioting at their gates.

[kartikg]

Which makes you just as selfish as they are.

The rich benefit more than most from living in a society that is stabilised by government spending as they have more to lose. They like having defence, police and a legal system obviously, but welfare spending also helps them, as without it the poor could well be rioting at their gates.

Yup!

[Slate]

Iceland’s Prime Minister Steps Down Amid Panama Papers Scandal

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/06/world/europe/panama-papers-iceland.html

[Slate]

Bloomberg article from back in January.

The World’s Favorite New Tax Haven Is the United States

Moving money out of the usual offshore secrecy havens and into the U.S. is a brisk new business.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/the-world-s-favorite-new-tax-haven-is-the-united-states

“How ironic—no, how perverse—that the USA, which has been so sanctimonious in its condemnation of Swiss banks, has become the banking secrecy jurisdiction du jour,” wrote Peter A. Cotorceanu, a lawyer at Anaford AG, a Zurich law firm, in a recent legal journal. “That ‘giant sucking sound’ you hear? It is the sound of money rushing to the USA.”

Rothschild, the centuries-old European financial institution, has opened a trust company in Reno, Nev., a few blocks from the Harrah’s and Eldorado casinos. It is now moving the fortunes of wealthy foreign clients out of offshore havens such as Bermuda, subject to the new international disclosure requirements, and into Rothschild-run trusts in Nevada, which are exempt.

[fromthedeepestjungle]

i should not say this but how sweet it is

[White Unicorn]

Bernie Sanders discussing the problems with the Panama Free Trade Agreement in October 2011 and in essence predicting what we are now seeing with the Panama Papers...

Cz

I didn't watch the video, buy I'd like to say Bernie was involved in making a lot of things more transparent. He saw how financial systems used loopholes of international law to move shadow profit legally. I think when he says get the money from the ones who wrecked our economy, he wants to close loopholes on the corporations moving money out of tax systems. When something like this is made public though it will only focus on the top terrorists funnelling not the big corporations or individuals at the top who orchestrated it well with international lawyers. Follow the money flows because of antiterrorist intelligences and you will find more political leaders and those bad ceos he talks about.

Bernie has alot of experience looking deeper into money funnelling in and out. You got to give the man credit for finding corruptions in the system and bringing them more to light and trying to change many loopholes of laws that created the mess.

Edited April 6, 2016 by White Unicorn

[Czero 101]

The fallout from Panama Papers revelations so far, country by country

http://www.theguardi...ntry-by-country

Russia claimed ‘Putinphobia’ was afoot, but Iceland’s PM was less cool under pressure – and David Cameron is still feeling the heat

Cz

[Gingitsune]

France and Tunisia also had people involved. Jean-Marie LePen in France was mentionned and a former president of Tunisia. And that's the only I heard of, there are probably more. The Guardian map is incomplete, thus misleading.

[Slate]

Swiss banker whistleblower: CIA behind Panama Papers

Bradley Birkenfeld is the most significant financial whistleblower of all time, so you might think he’d be cheering on the disclosures in the new Panama Papers leaks. But today, Birkenfeld is raising questions about the source of the information that is shaking political regimes around the world.

Birkenfeld, an American citizen, was a banker working at UBS in Switzerland when he approached the U.S. government with information on massive amounts of tax evasion by Americans with secret accounts in Switzerland. By the end of his whistleblowing career, Birkenfeld had served more than two years in a U.S. federal prison, been awarded $104 million by the IRS for his information and shattered the foundations of more than a century of Swiss banking secrecy.

In an exclusive interview Tuesday from Munich, Birkenfeld said he doesn’t think the source of the 11 million documents stolen from a Panamanian law firm should automatically be considered a whistleblower like himself.

Instead, he said, the hacking of the Panama City-based firm, called Mossack Fonseca, could have been done by a U.S. intelligence agency.

“The CIA I’m sure is behind this, in my opinion,” Birkenfeld said.

Birkenfeld pointed to the fact that the political uproar created by the disclosures have mainly impacted countries with tense relationships with the United States. “The very fact that we see all these names surface that are the direct quote-unquote enemies of the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, Argentina and we don’t see one U.S. name. Why is that?” Birkenfeld said. “Quite frankly, my feeling is that this is certainly an intelligence agency operation.”

Asked why the U.S. would leak information that has also been damaging to U.K. Prime Minister

David Cameron

, a major American ally, Birkenfeld said the British leader was likely collateral damage in a larger intelligence operation.

“If you’ve got NSA and CIA spying on foreign governments they can certainly get into a law firm like this,” Birkenfeld said. “But they selectively bring the information to the public domain that doesn’t hurt the U.S. in any shape or form.

That’s wrong. And there’s something seriously sinister here behind this.”