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THE ANONYMOUS SOURCE responsible for leaking the vast document trove known as the Panama Papers said in a manifesto published on Friday that she or he “would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement” to ensure the prosecution of wrongdoing revealed by the paper trail — but only once “governments codify legal protections for whistleblowers into law.”

The source wrote that the leaked files on offshore business dealings and shell companies organized by Mossack Fonseca, a law firm based in Panama, revealed “the scandal of what is legal and allowed.”

But the source, who took the name “John Doe,” argued that since “the law firm, its founders, and employees actually did knowingly violate myriad laws worldwide, repeatedly,” the wrongdoers there should now be prosecuted.

Doe added that prosecutors require access to the original documents, noting that media outlets “have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies. I, however, would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement to the extent that I am able.”

“That being said,” Doe continued, “I have watched as one after another, whistleblowers and activists in the United States and Europe have had their lives destroyed by the circumstances they find themselves in after shining a light on obvious wrongdoing.” Doe explained:

Edward Snowden is stranded in Moscow, exiled due to the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute him under the Espionage Act. For his revelations about the NSA, he deserves a hero’s welcome and a substantial prize, not banishment. Bradley Birkenfeld was awarded millions for his information concerning Swiss bank UBS — and was still given a prison sentence by the Justice Department. Antoine Deltour is presently on trial for providing journalists with information about how Luxembourg granted secret “sweetheart” tax deals to multi-national corporations, effectively stealing billions in tax revenues from its neighbour countries. And there are plenty more examples.

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The Panama Papers: Laundering Havens for War Budgets (Video)

April 25, 2016

The Panama Papers: Laundering Havens for War Budgets (Video)

In mid-April, economist Michael Hudson told The Real News Network that global oil and mining industries and the U.S. State Department created Panama and Liberia for the express purpose of tax evasion.

Read a full transcript of Hudson’s exchange with host Sharmini Peries below.

SHARMINI PERIES, TRNN: It’s the Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.

Within a week the 11 million documents called the Panama papers, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, has become a household name. The documents are connected to the Panama law firm Mossack Fonsesca that helped establish offshore accounts for some of the wealthiest and most powerful leaders to launder money and evade taxes.

On Tuesday the police in Panama raided the Mossack Fonseca law firm to search for more documents linked to illicit activities. But what are they expecting to find, since we have already known for some time now that offshore accounts are being used to evade taxes by the banking sector, essentially white-collar crooks, at institutions such as Credit Suisse and others? But who is really behind the creation of these mechanisms and loopholes for tax evasion?

Our next guest, Michael Hudson, says Panama was created as a tax haven by certain sectors of our economy for this purpose. Joining us now from New York is Michael Hudson. Michael is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and he’s a former balance of payments economist for Chase Manhattan bank. He is the author of many books, and the latest among them is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy. And if you want to know more about that book, on our site you’ll find Chris Hedges interviewing Michael Hudson on this book. Thanks for joining us, Michael.

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Panama and the Criminalization of the Global Finance System

April 18, 2016

Panama and the Criminalization of the Global Finance System

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dennizn | Shutterstock.com

Sharmini Peries: Within a week the 11 million documents called the Panama papers, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, has become a household name. The documents are connected to the Panama law firm Mossack Fonsesca that helped establish offshore accounts for some of the wealthiest and most powerful leaders to launder money and evade taxes.

Economist Michael Hudson says Panama was created as a tax haven by certain sectors of our economy for this purpose. Hudson is a distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and he’s a former balance of payments economist for Chase Manhattan bank. He is the author of many books, and the latest among them is Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy.

Michael, let’s begin with a short history of the creation of Panama and how it was bought from Colombia by the United States, and its relevance today vis-a-vis the Panama papers.

HUDSON: Well, Panama was basically carved off from Colombia in order to have a canal. It was created very much like Liberia. It’s not really a country in the sense that a country has its own currency and its own tax system. Panama uses U.S. dollars. So does Liberia.

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Panama Papers: The Geopolitical Impact of Tax Evasion and Offshoring

April 18, 2016

Panama Papers: The Geopolitical Impact of Tax Evasion and Offshoring

The recent revelations of the so–called Panama Papers– a massive 2.6 TB collection of data concerning the hidden shell companies of the world’s leaders and other famed personalities – have sent waves of astonishment through societies around the world. Since the release of the Panama Papers on April 3rd by the Munich-based daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, in conjunction with the Washington DC- based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the fallout has continued to rattle various political regimes, as hurricanes of PR-aimed stunts, legal investigations, state-enacted Internet bans, and even the resignation of a prime minister have ensued. The fall-out of the event has been quite embarrassing and in many cases damaging for all parties involved.

As usual, fingers are being pointed at various individuals and organizations as the alleged culprits behind the leak that has been dubbed as the “greatest leak of the century” by some commentators. Although the leaker of the cache has been known simply as “John Doe” (arguably a rather dry pseudonym – why not something a bit more fierce-sounding like “FireFawkes”?), certain state intelligence agencies, such as the CIA have not been exempt from the accusation as well. This hypothesis takes into consideration that many of the affected states and individuals are viewed as “enemies” or “rivals” of the United States by Washington, while the leak has left the United States relatively unscathed. Major states revealed in the Panama Papers, such as the People’s Republic of China, Russia, North Korea, and Argentina, have had or continue to have some historic tension with the United States over ideology or over some global or regional designs. On the other hand, Moscow has been accused of being behind the leak due to the speculation that the hacker who leaked the archives to the German daily was suspected of having a Russian sponsorship.

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Panama Papers – Who Instigated the Leak? USA or Russia?

April 10, 2016

Panama Papers – Who Instigated the Leak? USA or Russia?

The US think tank Brookings Institution is claiming that Russia had released the Panama Papers in order to destabilize the West. Wikileaks claimed the exact opposite that the publications have been launched by the United States. Our sources put the blame on neither. Indeed, it is starting to emerge that attempts to leak information to Germany before were ignored by the government. Several times a whistleblower attempted to provide information to the Minister of Finance. The whistleblower wanted to expose questionable dealings of the Bundesdruckerei which is a state owned company with one of the longest histories in the business, dating as far back as the 18th century. The German government took over Bundesdruckerei as a wholly state-owned company. In recent years, however, the company has been transformed into a leading international Full ID | Management supplier.

SPIEGEL is now reporting that the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and his Secretary of StateWerner Gatzer have refused contact with a whistleblower for years. The Ministry of Finance assumed Bundesdruckerei had used this company to do business in Venezuela.

It appears that the whistleblower is German. This appears to be really an internal breach rather than a state orchestrated event. There appears to be no real motive to expose the Panama Papers for this has been following the same path as to why Hitler did not invade Switzerland; he too needed access to secret measures. Switzerland’s secrecy began when Hitler made it illegal to have an account outside of Germany. He could have invaded Switzerland for defeating his laws, but he did not. There are some lines you do not cross. and this is one of them.

Consequently, the leak does appear to be internal for personal political reasons rather than instigated by USA or Russia.

The Panama Papers: Oozing Slime

April 8, 2016

The Panama Papers: Oozing Slime

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dennizn | Shutterstock.com

The Panama Papers, a one-year investigation by over 100 reporters worldwide (The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism) of offshore money hiding/laundering/taxation avoidance, is a cause célèbre of underhandedness seldom, if ever, revealed to the world’s public. It is comparable to lifting a rotting log in the woods and finding an active nest of millipedes, red worms, and cockroaches scampering about to escape the bright sunlight. They can’t stand the sunlight because darkness is their life.

“It’s the biggest leak in history, dwarfing the data released by the Wikileaks organization in 2010. For context, if the amount of data released by Wikileaks was equivalent to the population of San Francisco, the amount of data released in the Panama Papers is the equivalent to that of India,” (BBC News, April 5th).

Remarkably, it may only be the tip of an iceberg, a big one, as the incident references the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca & Co. There are likely many more in the world of behind the scenes finance.

The Panama Papers, containing info on thousands of shell companies set up to avoid taxes and hide assets for over four decades from 1977 to 2015, are all about millionaires and billionaires and the politically connected “sticking it to” average citizens of the world by hiding money from fellow countrymen’s taxation policies and/or theft of state funds and laundering money. It is outrageously heinous and deserving of criminal incrimination and/or tarring and feathering whilst run out of town on a rail. It also begs the question of how many more rich pillagers are out there.

Already, major worldwide figureheads, like the PM of Iceland, have fallen. “As much as $21 trillion in global wealth is hidden behind largely-untraceable shell companies such as those exposed in the Panama Papers, according to watchdog group Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition,” (NBC News, April 6, 2016.).

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Let Me Tell You About the Very Rich

April 7, 2016

Let Me Tell You About the Very Rich

The Panama Papers highlight, with painstaking clarity, that austerity is not a shared sacrifice.

It’s not like we didn’t know what was going on. But the “Panama Papers,” the largest-ever document leak and one that implicates political leaders and business executives around the world, confirms it — cementing a widespread distrust of public and private institutions in the global economy.

It remains to be seen whether the scale of the revelations, whose full scope is only slowly starting to emerge, will be a catalyst for positive change or just more fodder for curmudgeonly conspiracy theorists. But one thing is clear: The debate over global economic policy is going to be deeply affected for a while to come.

The epic document dump, which includes 11.5 million files from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, implicates a string of world leaders, their families, and close associates in an intricate web of shell companies constructed for the sole purpose of hiding money from tax authorities.

Following the Great Recession and world financial meltdown, policymakers have fallen broadly into two camps: those who see a significant role for official intervention through fiscal and monetary stimulus policies, and those who see government as the problem and push for structural changes to push it out of the way.

Both Europe and the United States imposed considerable austerity on government finances despite prevailing modern economic thinking suggesting governments should spend more, not less, in times of economic weakness.

This budget-cutting approach to exiting the economic crisis, predicated on the dubious notion that fiscal prudence will boost confidence and hence growth, was sold to the public as a shared sacrifice across society. But as the Panama Papers appear to show, the very wealthy play by an entirely different set of rules than the average person when it comes to paying taxes.

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Royal Bank and BMO defend Canada’s banking sector amid Panama Papers and Fintrac fine

April 7, 2016

Royal Bank and BMO defend Canada’s banking sector amid Panama Papers and Fintrac fine

Bad week for big banks as tax haven discussion hits at same time as fine levied for lack of disclosur

It has been a rough week, reputationally for Canadian banks, but fundamentally they remain among the world’s best. (Mark Blinch/Reuters)

Royal Bank of Canada CEO David McKay said at the bank’s annual general meeting in Montreal on Wednesday that the bank is currently combing through its records to see what ties the bank may have to Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which is at the heart of the current banking secrecy scandal.

On Monday, RBC was implicated in the Panama Papers scandal when documents in the leak unearthed that the bank had created at least 370 foreign corporations on behalf of its clients via Mossack Fonseca over the years.

While there’s nothing illegal in and of itself from setting up a foreign bank account, such vehicles can be used to evade taxes, as opposed to avoiding and minimizing them via legitimate means.

McKay said he is unhappy the bank’s name has been “dragged into” the controversy involving offshore tax evasion allegations, especially considering that there is no evidence to suggest the company has done anything illicit.

“As a CEO, I have to be concerned about our brand and reputation, particularly in a situation where there’s absolutely no allegation of wrongdoing,” McKay said.

“We just happen to have a couple hundred files, going back 40 years, that are attached to this legal firm,” he said. “That’s all that’s been reported.”

The Panama Papers Problem

April 6, 2016

The Panama Papers Problem

The Panama tax haven leaks reveal a lot about the lawlessness of the rich, as well as the ideological bias of the western press. “Vladimir Putin’s name appears nowhere, but the corporate media used his image repeatedly to drum up interest in what is an otherwise newsworthy story.” Americans are conspicuous by their absence from the story. That’s because rich people in the U.S. can avoid taxes “legally in Wyoming, Delaware or Nevada.”

The worst criminals on earth are not the poor who sit behind bars in jails and prisons. The biggest thieves are found among the rich. The 1% can buy legislation, politicians and the media to carry out and hide their dirty work. If they can’t change the laws to benefit themselves in their homelands they simply send their money elsewhere through shell holding companies. This transfer of wealth, much of it diverted from what ought to be tax payments, is an open secret. Panama, the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg and Switzerland are known for securing the money and secrets of the rich and the well connected.

The leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panama based Mossack Fonseca law firm brings into the light of day what was long known but passively accepted. Now the facts are in the open but the way in which the revelations are reported is questionable and taints an important story.

The documents now known as the Panama Papers were leaked to the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) who then shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). ICIJ is a non-profit but with its own problematic origins. It is funded in part by the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Kellogg Foundation and the Rockefeller Family Fund. ICIJ then worked with journalists around the world including from the Guardian and the McClatchy newspaper chain.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Panama Papers only a glimpse into ‘astonishing’ wealth stashed offshore

April 6, 2016

Panama Papers only a glimpse into ‘astonishing’ wealth stashed offshore

Some estimates suggest between 8 and 14 per cent of global wealth is kept in tax havens

It's estimated that at least $7 trillion and up to $32 trillion is currently kept in holdings in tax havens.

It’s estimated that at least $7 trillion and up to $32 trillion is currently kept in holdings in tax havens. (Eric Gaillard/Reuters)

The provocative revelations coming out of the so-called Panama Papers are just a glimpse into the murky global network that’s keeping “absolutely astonishing” amounts of money out of public coffers.

The 11.5 million files taken from Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca show how the financial elite exploit a secretive system to manoeuvre wealth anonymously and ensure the taxman doesn’t take his cut.

The firm is “the world’s fourth biggest provider of offshore services,” according to the Guardian, with about $42 million in yearly revenue. The documents contain information about more than 214,000 shell companies, trusts and foundations — usually used to hold or transfer financial assets while obfuscating the identity of their real owner — that were registered with the firm.

“That gives a sense of the tremendous scope of this in terms of the flows of money into these largely mysterious companies, and this is only one firm,” says Nicholas Shaxson, an investigative journalist and author of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World.

It’s difficult to delineate what constitutes a tax haven but it’s generally agreed that, depending on the criteria, there are between 70 and 92 states serving as such worldwide. And there’s an estimated two million shell companies registered with offshore firms in these states.

Panama Papers shell company graphic

(CBC)

“For a long time, people thought of tax havens as an exotic sideshow of the world economy. Now it’s clear they are absolutely central to it. We’re talking about absolutely astonishing, mind-boggling amounts of money,” Shaxson says.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Panama Papers

April 5, 2016

The Panama Papers

A lot of emails have been coming in with regard to the Panama Papers. Let me say this from the outset — Panama has been the key place to establish offshore accounts for decades. This was not a government hack. The German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung obtained the stash of records from an anonymous source and shared their findings with more than 100 media groups through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The documents show links to 72 current or former heads of state including dictators. The ICIJ is hell bent on attacking the rich, not politicians. So are they protecting fellow Socialists? The press has not made all the documents available and that is curious, for they too can be protecting favored people.

This is the biggest document leak in history and it is exposing world leaders and their secretive, offshore financial dealings. Some 11.5 million documents have been leaked from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, which has offices in 35 countries. This leak has exposed a trove of confidential financial dealings by the elites and spans to aides of Russian President Vladimir Putin all the way to relatives of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Naturally, the press likes to focus on Putin. There is much more hidden behind the press curtain.

While the elite seek to hunt people for taxes, they often live separate financial lives. This tremendous conflict of interest has now been revealed. Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson secretly owned millions of dollars in bank bonds during his country’s financial crisis when the country’s financial system collapsed and banks had to be bailed-out. Thousands are now demanding Iceland’s Prime Minister to resign over Panama Papers revelations.

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