The proof is in the Putin: thread for Panama Papers/Mossack Fonseca leaks.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/03/panama-papers-money-hidden-offshore

I believe we will have more soon has it unfolds.

Is it wishful thinking that this might be the end of large scale offshore banking? Like many, I think this is one of the main economic issues of this century.

Also, good job journalists, what a massive investigation.

Wishful thinking x1000000000

Just trying to get the ball rolling here. But yes.

'The report is based on a data leak of 11.5 million records for 214,488 entities connected to people in more than 200 countries or territories. The leak includes emails, financial spreadsheets, passport information and corporate records. It spans nearly 40 years, from 1977 through the end of 2015.' Washington Post

The Guardian framing it as a Putin story is probably inevitable given how badly they did in reporting unsubstantiated rumours about his personal wealth in 2007 but this is much bigger and more interesting than that. Mossack has set up nearly a quarter of a million companies over the last 40 years and as far as i can tell, there's not a great deal that Panama offers over other tax havens apart from byzantine ownership laws and a supposed guarantee of elevated secrecy. Tax authorities all over the world are going to be raking over the details though i don't know how easy it would be to obtain convictions on stolen / hacked evidence.

http://waitingfortax.com/2016/04/04/some-thoughts-on-the-panama-papers/

to be honest, my initial reaction was 'only $2 billion !!?'.

I suspect he has diversified interests through various different scumbag countries/schemes. 2 billion is just what he's invested with these pricks.

Even if this (probably) goes nowhere, learning that Ian Cameron's company is called Blairmore is just perfect.

None of this ties back to Putin directly, it's just assumed (probably correctly) that it couldn't be happening without his awareness and that he must have a stake in it. Putin has no visible wealth and there's no solid evidence to suggest he has vast amounts of hidden assets but it's not particularly plausible that he wouldn't.

Australia is the first country to launch an investigation - targeting around 800 people apparently. This will hopefully put more pressure on Panama to sign up to the transparency rules almost all other tax havens have agreed to. That said, so much dirty money from Russia and elsewhere is cleaned through the UK and Cyprus, having rules in place isn't a corrective in itself.

Sidenote: "the proof is in the pudding" is a meaningless and irrational anger-making bastardisation, I move for a thread title change to "the proof of the putin is in the cheatin'".

^

LOL Pedro Almodovar in the frame now.

Along with the Aliyevs of Azerbaijan, Ahmadinejad and Poroshenko of Ukraine.

And who'd've thought a Prime Minister of Pakistan could get involved in something like this?

Yes, the main take away is that everyone you assumed had a secret offshore bank account has a secret offshore bank account.

http://i.imgur.com/SdTAKLa.jpg

No 3 so still room for improvement.

Would be nice to imagine this as a launchpad for sweeping reform but i suspect it would trigger a collapse in the UK housing market if things became too transparent.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35962670

Iceland's prime minister has refused to resign after being accused of hiding millions of dollars in investments behind a secretive offshore company.

Leaked documents show that Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson and his wife bought offshore company Wintris in 2007.

He did not declare an interest in the company when entering parliament in 2009. He sold his 50% of Wintris to his wife for $1 (70p), eight months later

bookmarked, looking forward to seeing this story play out

PLATS

I would imagine/hope that this trove of info will provide a pretty good foundation for further investigations, wouldn't it? I mean yeah it's not interesting to know that a Putin aid has an offshore company, but it would be interesting to find out what the flow of money is to and from that company and what it's being used for. The problem normally, as I understand it, is that these things are anonymous, so you might be able to find out that "Cool Boss 69 Ltd." of Cayman Islands owns a certain property, you just have no idea who is behind Cool Boss 69 Ltd., where it gets its money from, etc.

I could see this stuff being in a big database and then particular transactions and names could be checked against the database.

It's less interesting on the Russian side because the players (Rotenburg, etc) are fairly well known but at the point that money moves over from black to grey to legit via countries like the UK and US, it could get spicy. Putting money into offshore banks is one thing, taking it out and investing it in legal businesses is something else and has the potential to cause a lot of embarrassment. Huge tracts of prime UK real estate have been sold to offshore dummy companies - tracing some of those back to world leaders would be fun.

6 peers, 3 ex-Tory MPs and 'dozens' of party donors... oh and the Prime Minister's father. Still a pretty disappointing haul, if you ask me.

Early days!

Yeah, so far they've only released info about 200 out of over 200,000 accounts. Guessing there's a lot more to come.

Things are getting serious, it's being reported that protesters have been throwing fromage frais at the Icelandic parliament building.

Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai and Iqbal Mirchi are the latest to be named from India. Mirchi is the most interesting as he was the chief lieutenant of Dawood Ibrahim, India / Pakistan's top criminal kingpin and suspect in crimes ranging from extortion and drug trafficking to the Bombay bombings in the early 90s.

iirc Mirchi lived in London towards the end of his life and was rumoured to have extensive UK holdings.

It's less interesting on the Russian side because the players (Rotenburg, etc) are fairly well known but at the point that money moves over from black to grey to legit via countries like the UK and US, it could get spicy. Putting money into offshore banks is one thing, taking it out and investing it in legal businesses is something else and has the potential to cause a lot of embarrassment. Huge tracts of prime UK real estate have been sold to offshore dummy companies - tracing some of those back to world leaders would be fun.

― On a Raqqa tip (ShariVari), Monday, 4 April 2016 17:11 (31 minutes ago) Permalink

Right, it's not who has the accounts, it's who's paying the accounts and who the accounts are paying. I don't care if some major Putin aide has hundreds of millions of dollars offshore, but I care if it's paying some US politician's "consulting" company, for example.

Platini.

these crooks were deep into the illegal stock image trade as well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3J8S72qGh8

CAREERS
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If you are interested in becoming part of the team please submit your curriculum below. Thank you for your interest in Mossack Fonseca.

"it should be stressed they have not done anything illegal"

#keepYourNerve

Apparently major US papers weren't involved in the initial document dump & ICIJ work, so NYT and WaPo buried the story today:
http://www.vocativ.com/305040/no-panama-papers-on-front-pages/

yeah I wonder what the story is there, why the Miami Herald and not the NYT?

Miami is a big destination for shady offshore money fwiw

I think the vocativ piece probably nails it in that "other reporters discover supposedly huge trove of juice" isn't much news when you can't fact check anything

after they all get copies of the docs, then game very well be on

I figure a searchable database of some of the files will totally be a thing by the end of this week

the scale of the leak would make it really difficult to process without purpose-built tools though

I figure a searchable database of some of the files will totally be a thing by the end of this week

https://panamapapers.icij.org/the_power_players/

for a start

Huge tracts of prime UK real estate have been sold to offshore dummy companies - tracing some of those back to world leaders would be fun.

― On a Raqqa tip (ShariVari), Monday, April 4, 2016 5:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The week-long NYT series on who owns condos in the Time-Warner Building went way in-depth about how U.S. real estate was becoming one of the more effective ways to hide money, related directly to what's going on here. Most of the condos in that building, and the new needle thin NYC skyscrapers, are owned by nearly untraceable shell companies.

Planet Money had a pretty good thing on offshore companies a few weeks ago, and toward the end of it they concluded that it was actually easier to set up, and easier to hide your identity in, a Nevada LLC than in an offshore company. Although there are plenty of other "advantages" to an offshore company relating to taxes.

The ICIJ has confirmed that they are not planning to release the full dataset, which is likely to raise eyebrows in some sectors. It's arguably a good move as a fairly high proportion of the businesses could be entirely 'legal' and it would compromise the privacy of a lot of individuals but it's going to fuel some of the scepticism about the motivations and chain of evidence behind the leak.

ICIJ, iirc, gets a lot of its funding from Soros and USAID and there have already been moves in Russia and elsewhere to discredit them based on that. Partly on what they have released, partly on what they haven't. There hasn't really been any major news involving US institutions afaict - that might be because the details were not given to US newspapers but there's a competing theory that they are being selective in what they highlight. It would probably be fairly difficult to get any of the outlets it was shared with to go along with it, though.

USA today is the only paper brave enough to go against this conspiracy

time to invade Panama again imho

maybe it would reinvigorate oliver stone's career

after they all get copies of the docs, then game very well be on

I figure a searchable database of some of the files will totally be a thing by the end of this week

― other people systems as applicable (El Tomboto), Tuesday, April 5, 2016 1:33 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah they talk about that here - http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/why-no-big-splash-for-panama-papers/

(the fact that they had to wait for copies of the docs)

https://45.media.tumblr.com/8bd325d7a2ecfeab1a037276ccb42984/tumblr_nxu28ii2AU1uewx7xo1_400.gif

Huge tracts of prime UK real estate have been sold to offshore dummy companies - tracing some of those back to world leaders would be fun.

― On a Raqqa tip (ShariVari), Monday, April 4, 2016 5:11 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Private Eye have a searchable database (and Excel file for download) of properties owned by offshore companies here, if anyone's interested:

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/registry

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/business/real-estate-news/article69248462.html

Bizarrely Cameron has decided to make his first public appearance since the Panama Papers leak at Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Icelandic PM has gone. Hopefully not the first political casualty.

"Last", surely?

doesnt stuff like this make the proposed 'bipartisan' tax amnesty look like a giveaway to these fucking crooks? I'd like to think maybe the timing of this story isn't a coincidence.

lol, last, indeed (xp)

The basic story, that the rich are hiding massive amounts of their wealth and screwing everyone, is extremely simple to grasp. The details in those 11,000,000 documents are so vast that it will be a year at least before most of the stones that the lizards are currently hiding under are turned over and they scuttle out into the daylight.

The mouthpieces for the rich will assure us repeatedly that 'none of this was illegal', as if that were the essential point.

just to put the investigation/publication timeline into perspective, the ICIJ has been working on this for a year already.

xp setting up the companies itself isn't illegal, it's what they did with them that may have been.

WikiLeaks was 1.7gb of data, this is 2600gb.

i was so busy riding the trump train that i missed this completely til a colleague sends us this horrible abc piece:

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/panama-rejects-money-launder-label-documents-leak-38153237

i love how there still exists tonnes of US residents who believe the US propaganda that says "look! panama! bad country! latin america! bad! bad! bad!"

It took all of five minutes for the new FIFA President to become implicated in corruption.

It took all of five minutes for the new FIFA President to become implicated in corruption.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrn_Hqc2-Q4

(and yes, that is mary byker .. )

Run, Fat Boy, Run

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7ea6c0013ece9a5b95a37d0fe855fa3ade2ed434/0_68_1572_942/master/1572.jpg

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d698947150ae4ad7e3e5d4cc6ef8d196f4be4068/0_64_1530_918/master/1530.jpg?w=780&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=5cfbc18b2854633f7163c8da0b30dfdf

It's been interesting to see the way Cameron is portrayed visually: when he's under the cosh, his neck disappears in the accompanying photos; when he's seen to have some kind of 'win', the picture is of Atkins Diet Dave.

So Downing Street say he won't benefit from daddy's little legacy in the future, oh that clears all that up then.

Pretty sure he's going to come out of this scot free tbh. Other Tories are going to be in the firing line though. And MPs from other parties, I expect.

It is good system that, if everyone is a criminal then no-one is guilty!

As discussed upthread:

One of the surprises about the Panama Papers – the largest leak from an offshore tax adviser in history – is how few Americans have so far been exposed. The reason? It may be because creating a shell company in the US is easier than obtaining a library card.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/06/panama-papers-us-tax-havens-delaware?CMP=share_btn_tw

Cameron should be fine, though it will be interesting seeing him trying to phrase his denials so carefully under a proper grilling.

Part of me wonders if there's an Osborne revelation still to come.

Steve Reed ‏@SteveReedMP 2h2 hours ago

Now BBC reporting Osborne fails to answer whether he benefits from an offshore fund - he terminated interview when pressed

he terminated interview when pressed

Bit of spin there tbh.

incredible to look at this http://www.private-eye.co.uk/registry pan across london in particular but the whole of the country and get an idea of the land and buildings owned by companies registered in these places transparently for dodgy tax reasons

Swiss police has carried out a raid on UEFA headquarters.

Isn't another possible explanation for there not being a lot of Americans just that there are a bunch of other firms that do this kind of work and maybe this one just didn't have a lot of American clients?

Yes. And Suddeutsch Zeitung has implied the leak with all the Americans in it is still to come, I swear I read that somewhere.

http://www.vocativ.com/305557/the-most-bonkers-panama-papers-conspiracy-theories/

Wasn't here but the quote is referenced; also, lol

This is interesting:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/monicamark/the-panama-papers-may-help-unravel-the-corruption-deal-of-th?utm_term=.vuej1BB1o3#.irO3OllOgx

Strong echoes of the Russian 'cash for shares' scandals of the 90s where state assets were given away for nothing (accompanied by huge bribes) to be sold for billions further down the track.

The dramatic change in ownership was pushed through just a few days before former dictator Lansana Conté died at age 74 in December 2008. BSGR didn’t actually pay for the mine, but instead pledged to invest $165 million into exploring and upgrading it. Two years later, they sold 51% of their stake to another company — this time for $2.5 billion.

Put another way, BSGR netted a profit of some $2.2 billion — then worth twice the entire GDP of Guinea — in return for investing just $165 million. That prompted Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese billionaire whose foundation promotes good governance in Africa, to ask whether “the Guineans who did that deal” were “idiots, or criminals, or both.”

interesting that not a single guardian article that refers to the panama papers has an open comments thread.

but also a blessed relief

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-an-obscure-nonprofit-in-washington-protects-tax-havens-for-the-rich/2016/06/09/ab03e70a-2908-11e6-ae4a-3cdd5fe74204_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_panama-1020a-top%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

In the eight-page fundraising document discovered by The Post, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity in Alexandria, Va., said that it had already persuaded the Bush administration to thwart an international effort to require more transparency from tax havens. Now the center was promising to derail similar reforms in legislation before Congress.

Among those it planned to contact: lawmakers, key figures in the Bush White House, the Treasury Department, the State Department and the Office of Management and Budget.

...

In emails and documents sent to Mossack Fonseca between 2001 and 2012, the center said it had parlayed its access into action with the support of former House majority leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), high-ranking Treasury Department officials in the Bush administration, and members of key congressional committees that regulate U.S. tax and spending policy.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist?CMP=twt_gu

Shit man

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/18/guardian-bbc-legal-action-paradise-papers

Guardian getting sued by Appleby for publishing what they say were confidential, stolen documents.

ICIJ publishes West Africa Leaks and the results are as expected. Resource extraction continues, only faster and worse:
https://www.icij.org/investigations/west-africa-leaks/

Actress Isabelle Adjani, who was named in the Panama Papers, to be tried for tax evasion

French actress Isabelle Adjani is facing tax fraud and money laundering charges partly tied to Panama Papers revelations.

The star, who reportedly denies any wrongdoing, will be tried in Paris in October. She has been called to appear on Oct. 19. Judicial sources told French media that Adjani, 68, is accused of separate financial crimes.

In the first instance, she is alleged to have received a donation of two million euros from a Senegalese businessman, Mamadou Diagna Ndiaye, “under the guise of a loan.” This is said to have enabled Ndiaye, who is also an Olympic official, to evade transfer duties.

In the second, she is accused of passing 119,000 euros to an unknown beneficiary via an offshore company in 2014.

Adjani was revealed to be a shareholder of the offshore company, Deckert Investments Limited, by the 2016 Panama Papers investigation.

Based on that information, France’s National Financial Prosecutor’s Office reportedly opened its investigation into her at the end of 2016.