With the Panama Papers exposé perhaps we can now say the fortress walls of offshore secrecy are finally cracking. Such havens allow corruption and tax avoidance to take place on a massive international scale by some of the richest and most powerful people on Earth. Meanwhile, the poor get poorer.
Western politicians have huffed and puffed about clamping down on offshore havens but in reality their collective breath would not have knocked over a little piggy’s straw house let alone bastions of vested interest. It is thanks to investigative reporters, whistleblowers, and unprecedented international media collaboration that the matter is being forced.
The advocacy group Global Financial Integrity reports that illegal channeling of profits offshore cost developing countries nearly $6 trillion between 2001 and 2010. As Facebook posters like to remind us, 1 percent of the world’s population owns half the wealth and they like to hoard it.
But finally things may be changing. We are being treated to the third major offshore data leak in as many years. The first was the Cayman Islands tax leak in 2013 that exposed a huge number of major figures worldwide as holding accounts in the tiny island—a British dependency—in secrecy.
Then there was the great HSBC leak which revealed that the company’s Swiss private bank had helped wealthy account holders from other nations to dodge huge sums of due tax. Now it is the turn of Panama—an excellent place to park large sums of money.
