Alan Rusbridger — Panama: The Hidden Trillions

In a seminar room in Oxford, one of the reporters who worked on the Panama Papers is describing the main conclusion he drew from his months of delving into millions of leaked documents about tax evasion. “Basically, we’re the dupes in this story,” he says. “Previously, we thought that the offshore world was a shadowy, but minor, part of our economic system. What we learned from the Panama Papers is that it is the economic system.” 

Luke Harding, a former Moscow correspondent for The Guardian, was in Oxford to talk about his work as one of four hundred–odd journalists around the world who had access to the 2.6 terabytes of information about tax havens—the so-called Panama Papers—that were revealed to the world in simultaneous publication in eighty countries this spring. “The economic system is, basically, that the rich and the powerful exited long ago from the messy business of paying tax,” Harding told an audience of academics and research students. “They don’t pay tax anymore, and they haven’t paid tax for quite a long time. We pay tax, but they don’t pay tax. The burden of taxation has moved inexorably away from multinational companies and rich people to ordinary people.”

One of the chief objectives of neoliberalism is to remove taxes from capital and put them on labor, while simultaneously increasing capital share over labor share through other institutional arrangements in collusion with politicians on the make and take. The result is populist revolt that the establishment has pulled out all stops to confront.

New York Review of Books
Panama: The Hidden Trillions
Alan Rusbridger

ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Yves Smith — “John Doe’s Manifesto”: Panama Papers Source Blasts Lack of Media Interest, Calls for Prosecutions, Whistleblower Protection

Martha r flagged a new story at Suddeusche Zeitung from “John Doe,” the source for the Mossack Fonseca revelations, on what he intended to accomplish and what he feels needs to be done. I’m posting on his manifesto to encourage you to read it in full and circulate it.
The whistleblower, John Doe, states his underlying objective was to tackle “massive, pervasive corruption” that promotes and perpetuates income inequality. He is encouraged by the debate so far but stresses that the underlying behavior was criminal and needs to be treated as such:

Looks like the perps are just going to get another pass.

“John Doe’s Manifesto”: Panama Papers Source Blasts Lack of Media Interest, Calls for Prosecutions, Whistleblower Protection
Yves Smith

Source — The People and Tech Behind the Panama Papers – Interview with Mar Cabra, ICIJ Data & Research

If you are into the nuts and bolts.

Source
The People and Tech Behind the Panama Papers
Interview with Mar Cabra, head of the Data & Research Unit at ICIJ

McClatchyDC — Inside Panama Papers: Multiple Clinton connections

Hillary Clinton recently blasted the hidden financial dealings exposed in the Panama Papers, but she and her husband have multiple connections with people who have used the besieged law firm Mossack Fonseca to establish offshore entities.…

The ties are both recent and decades old, not surprising for the Democratic presidential front-runner and her husband, who have been in public life since the 1970s.…

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article72215012.html#storylink=cpy

McClatchy
Inside Panama Papers: Multiple Clinton connections

Anita Kumar, Marisa Taylor And Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Laundering Havens for War Budgets — Sharmini Peries interviews Michael Hudson

“Closing Panama Tax Haven Will Require Fighting the Most Powerful Lobby In the World,” The Real News Network, April 14, 2016.

Economist Michael Hudson says oil and mining industries and the State Department created Panama and Liberia for the express purpose of tax evasion.

Video and transcript.

MichaelHudson.com
Laundering Havens for War BudgetsSharmini Peries interviews Michael Hudson, President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic ll Street Financial Trends (ISLET), a WaAnalyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

John Helmer — BROOKINGS LAUNCHES UNGUIDED MISSILE – THE PANAMA PAPERS AS PUTIN PLOT

A closer look into Brookings.

Clifford Gaddy … has never recovered from his 20-year infatuation with Anatoly Chubais and Alexei Kudrin. Neither has Gaddy’s boss at Brookings Institution in Washington, Strobe Talbott, the regime changer-in-chief at the State Department in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin was his man in the Kremlin, and the rest of the country too weak to resist.

If only they ruled Russia today, President Chubais, Prime Minister Kudrin or vice versa, instead of President Vladimir Putin, there could never ever be the Kremlin plot Gaddy and Brookings charged last week for blackmailing United States officials and their allies with something like the Panama Papers. A regime-changing plot like that isn’t as preposterous as it sounds — not because Putin thought of it, as Gaddy now claims, but because Gaddy and Talbott used it a good many times themselves in Moscow, and in Belgrade too, until Putin put a stop to them. For lossmaking Brookings, however, putting a stop to Putin’s plotting is a desperate advertisement for badly needed funds.

“Are the Russians actually behind the Panama Papers?” is the title of Gaddy’s indictment. It isn’t an opinion-page piece placed in a newspaper. There’s no institutional disclaimer either. It is an official publication of the Brookings think-tank where Gaddy is chief expert on Russia, and Talbott is chief executive.

Also, the question isn’t a genuine one, because Gaddy’s answer is yes.…

Massive projection. These days one can be pretty sure that when a US official accuses an adversary of doing something, it is the US or its cronies, vassals, or minions doing it. It's a version of blame the victim. Helmer traces this out in terms of names and organizations. The Brookings thesis is based on cui bono? Helmer shows cui bono.

Dances with Bears
BROOKINGS LAUNCHES UNGUIDED MISSILE – THE PANAMA PAPERS AS PUTIN PLOT
John Helmer

See also

Russia Insider

Putin's Billions: Mystery Solved - They Don't Exist

Alexander Mercouris

Constantin Gurdgiev — 10/4/16: The Real 'Panamas' Of Tax Havens... Are Not In Central America

A lot of what is already known is now in the spotlight owing to the Panama papers.

True Economics

10/4/16: The Real 'Panamas' Of Tax Havens... Are Not In Central America
Constantin Gurdgiev

Martin Armstrong — Panama Papers – Who Instigated the Leak? USA or Russia?

A new theory emerges. Sounds reasonable.

Armstrong Economics

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

Dan Glazebrook — Britain is the heart and soul of tax evasion

The British government’s claim to be tackling tax evasion is about as credible as Al Capone claiming to be leading the fight against organized crime. In fact, Britain is at the heart of the global tax haven network, and continues to lead the fight against its regulation.

The 11 and a half million leaked documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca have proven, once again, what we have already known for some time – that the ‘offshore world’ of tax havens is a den of money laundering and tax evasion right at the heart of the global financial system.

Despite attempts by Western media to twist the revelations into a story about the ‘corruption’ of official enemies – North Korea, Syria, China and, of course, Putin, who is not even mentioned in the documents – the real story is the British government’s assiduous cultivation of the offshore world. For whilst corruption exists in every country, what enables that corruption to flourish and become institutionalized is the network of secretive financial regimes that allow the world’s biggest criminals and fraudsters to escape taxation, regulation and oversight of their activities. And this network is a conscious creation of the British state.

Of the 215,000 companies identified in the Mossack Fonseca documents, over half were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, one single territory in what tax haven expert Nicholas Shaxson calls a “spider’s web” of well over a dozen separate UK-controlled dens of financial chicanery.

In addition, the UK was ranked number two of those jurisdictions where the banks, law firms and other middlemen associated with the Panama Papers operate, only topped by Hong Kong, whose institutional environment is itself a creation of the UK. And of the ten banks who most frequently asked Mossack Fonseca to set up paper companies to hide their client’s finances, four were British: HSBC, Coutts, Rothschild and UBS.….

The entire UK-controlled web is home to offshore deposits estimated in 2009 to be worth $3.2 trillion, 55 percent of the global total….

The remnant of empire.

Whilst ostensibly involved in a process of ‘decolonization’, in fact the UK hung on to a large global network of small, sparsely-populated islands: “The British empire”, Shaxson wrote, “had faked its own death.” These islands were to serve the same imperial purpose the empire had always had: the projection of British power and the channeling of African, Asian and Latin American wealth into Britain. But whilst some of the islands, such as Diego Garcia and the Falklands, were to serve as crucial military outposts, many of the others were developed as a means of facilitating the financial plunder of the former colonial world.

In Shaxson’s words, the role of these tax havens is to “capture passing foreign business and channel it to London just as a spider’s web catches insects” whilst also acting as a “money laundering filter that lets the City get involved in dirty business while providing it with enough distance to maintain plausible deniability.”…

Indeed, much of Cameron’s battling with Europe has been driven precisely by the desire to maintain the impunity of the City and its web of tax havens in the face of attempts by the EU to regulate the banking sector.…

RT
Britain is the heart and soul of tax evasion
Dan Glazebrook

Thomas Piketty — Panama Papers: Act now. Don't wait for another crisis

You knew this was coming.

The Guardian
Panama Papers: Act now. Don't wait for another crisis

Thomas Piketty

A top expert on tax havens explains why the Panama Papers barely scratch the surface — Libby Nelson interviews Gabriel Zucman

The biggest scandal in the Panama Papers leak, which revealed that political leaders around the world were hiding money in offshore accounts, isn't about corruption or organized crime.

The 11.5 million files stolen from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca revealed just how unequal the world is.

The economist Gabriel Zucman estimated in his 2015 book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, that worldwide more than $7.5 trillion is squirreled away in offshore tax havens — 8 percent of the world's financial wealth. While some of it is properly declared to world governments, about 80 percent, or $6 trillion, is never taxed at all.

Zucman, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California Berkeley, argues that this tax avoidance worsens the vast global gap in wealth and income between the rich and the poor. Hiding vast sums of wealth from taxation makes it easier for the rich to stay rich and avoid tax policies meant to help the poor. Offshore accounts also make it harder for everyone else to get rich, because they're paying higher taxes to make up for the tax dollars the wealthy don't pay when they shelter their assets overseas.
"If we want to deal with rising inequality seriously, then we need to make these forms of tax dodging much, much more limited," Zucman told me in an interview.

We discussed how Zucman totaled up that $8 trillion number by solving a puzzling mystery in global economics, the disturbing lessons from the Panama Papers, and the drastic steps toward transparency Zucman argues are necessary in order to stop tax evasion.

The transcript of our conversation follows, edited and rearranged for length and clarity….

Vox
A top expert on tax havens explains why the Panama Papers barely scratch the surface
Libby Nelson interviews Gabriel Zucman, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California Berkeley

Pepe Escobar — Hybrid War, From Palmyra to Panama

Much more than the Panama papers.

Russia Insider
Hybrid War, From Palmyra to Panama

Pepe Escobar

See also

Strategic Culture Foundation
‘Cherry-picking’ leaked documents: a CIA art
Wayne Madsen

William K. Black — The WSJ and NYT Spin Elite Tax Fraud as “Good News”

See, we all have it all wrong. We all need to read the WSJ and the NYT and celebrate the good news of massive tax fraud by business elites and join together to denounce government. Ignore the tens of thousands of wealthy men behind the screen of bank secrecy evading taxes. They are a “distraction.”

The neoliberal spin machine.

Triple Crisis
The WSJ and NYT Spin Elite Tax Fraud as “Good News”
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

James Pheby — Panama Papers reveal London as centre of 'spider's web'

The files leaked from Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca exposed Britain's link to thousands of firms based in tax havens and how secret money is invested in British assets, particularly London property.

Critics accuse British authorities of turning a blind eye to the inflow of suspect money and of being too close to the financial sector to clamp down on the use of its overseas territories as havens, with the British Virgin Islands alone hosting 110,000 of the Mossack Fonseca's clients.

"London is the epicentre of so much of the sleaze that happens in the world," Nicholas Shaxson, author of the book "Treasure Islands", which examines the role of offshore banks and tax havens, told AFP.

The political analyst said that Britain itself was relatively transparent and clean, but that companies used the country's territories abroad -- relics of the days of empire -- to "farm out the seedier stuff", often under the guise of shell companies with anonymous owners.
"Tax evasion and stuff like that will be done in the external parts of the network. Usually there will be links to the City of London, UK law firms, UK accountancy firms and to UK banks," he said, calling London the centre of a "spider's web".

"They're all agents of the City of London -- that is where the whole exercise is controlled from," Richard Murphy, professor at London's City University, said of the offshore havens.

Old news but now it is on the front page.

Yahoo News
Panama Papers reveal London as centre of 'spider's web'
James Pheby/AFP

Ronald Zonca — Panama? Forget the reporter collective -- Who built the database?

The Panama papers raise more questions than they answer. Ronald Zonca asks some of the obvious ones.

Fort Russ
Panama? Forget the reporter collective -- Who built the database?

Ronald Zonca in Boulevard Voltaire, April 6, 2016
Translated from French by Tom Winter

Neil Wilson — Panama Pandemonium

Taxes.

3spoken
Panama Pandemonium
Neil Wilson

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard — Panama bombshell spells demise of shadow finance, and privacy

There's going to be a big kerfuffle between through demanding transparency and those demanding privacy. Stay tuned.

The Telegraph
Panama bombshell spells demise of shadow finance, and privacy
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Panama insiders have said that the source of the information was not, as Mossack is reporting, an intrusion by hackers, but an inside job. A former female employee, with access to the data, was allegedly involved in an intimate relationship with a Mossack name partner. The relationship ended badly some time ago, and the employee exacted her revenge by going public with Mossack client lists and related data.

Carribean News Now!
Data from Panama law firm stolen and turned over to journalists 

Kenneth Rijock

Robert Mackey — Iceland’s Prime Minister Resigns, First Casualty of #PanamaPapers

Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, resigned on Tuesday, becoming the first leader to be forced from office over the secret financial dealings revealed by the Panama Papers leak.

The prime minister, who was elected as a reformer in 2009, promising transparency following the ruinous collapse of three Icelandic banks the year before, failed to disclose that his family secretly held bonds worth millions of dollars in the same banks, through a shell company in the British Virgin Islands.

The Intercept
Iceland’s Prime Minister Resigns, First Casualty of #PanamaPapers
Robert Mackey

Moon of Alabama — Selective Leaks Of The #PanamaPapers Create Huge Blackmail Potential (and more)

Moon smells a rat.

Moon of Alabama
Selective Leaks Of The #PanamaPapers Create Huge Blackmail Potential

Backs up Moon.

Craig Murray
Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% From Panama Leak

Not just "Putin."

International Business Times
Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leaks reveal Xi Jinping's family links to offshore companies
Vasudevan Sridharan

Compare with 

Naked Capitalism
Mainstream Media Ignores Blockbuster Expose of Massive Bribery in Iraq by Unaoil
Yves Smith

Other Latin American notables, too.

telesur
Panama Papers: Macri Implicated in Offshore Tax Haven Scandal

What the story is about is the nebulous world of offshore tax evasion and tax havens, which based on data from the World Bank, IMF, UN, and central banks, hide between $21 and $32 trillion, where registered incorporation agents and law firms in small Caribbean countries (and not so small US states) make the laundering of money and the "disappearance" of the super wealthy, into untracable numbers hidden behind shell companies, possible.

So, in order to learn some more about the real star of this story, the Panamanian lawfirm of Mossack Fonseca, we went to Fusion which has compiled a fascinating story of the company's history, founders, and key milestone events in its life.
These include the Nazis, the CIA, Mexican drug lords, and of course, the U.S.

Zero Hedge
Mossack Fonseca: The Nazi, CIA And Nevada Connections... And Why It's Now Rothschild's Turn

Panama Papers: Macri Implicated in Offshore Tax Haven Scandal

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Mauricio-Macri-Implicated-in-Massive-Offshore-Tax-Haven-Scandal-20160403-0026.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Panama Papers: Macri Implicated in Offshore Tax Haven Scandal

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Mauricio-Macri-Implicated-in-Massive-Offshore-Tax-Haven-Scandal-20160403-0026.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Panama Papers: Macri Implicated in Offshore Tax Haven Scandal

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address: 
 "http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Mauricio-Macri-Implicated-in-Massive-Offshore-Tax-Haven-Scandal-20160403-0026.html". If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Matthew Yglesias — Panama Papers: a massive document leak reveals a global web of corruption and tax avoidance

The first analysis of the Panama Papers" not based on "Putin did it." In fact, Putin's name doesn't show up, but lots of others do.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has a full profile of political figures and their relatives named in the Panama Papers for your reading pleasure.

Vox
Panama Papers: a massive document leak reveals a global web of corruption and tax avoidance
Matthew Yglesias