The Panama Papers: how the world’s rich and famous hide their money offshore

Somewhat ironic, I think.

(Yes, some of the 100+ news organizations are ad free, such as the mandatory tv license-paid state broadcaster/propaganda organ SVT from my country, Sweden, but they also have their own motives of wanting to control the data.)

"Une partie (exploitable) de la fuite consiste en une base de données structurées des quelque 215 000 structures offshore de la firme panaméenne Mossack Fonseca avec, pour chacune, les dates de création, de dissolution, l’identité des actionnaires déclarés et leur lieu de domiciliation. Cette partie sera publiée en mai par le consortium international des journalistes d’investigation (ICIJ), qui a coordonné l’investigation."

I'm too lazy to translate it for you but basically it says that part of the leak will be released in May. They also wrote an article explaining why they don't release everything: http://www.lemonde.fr/panama-papers/article/2016/04/04/pourq...

If no-one uses them, great.

If everyone uses them, you have a lower effective tax rate and different policy outcomes to the ones expected, so there might be distortions.

If others use them but you don't, you're at a competitive disadvantage.

An analogy for the everyman - imagine that there's a loophole me and everyone else in my city could use as individuals to completely avoid tax. If I choose not to do so, I'm receiving, say, 20-30% less income than I would annually, putting me at a huge disadvantage when performing normal activities such as buying a home, say.

I don't think that tax avoidance is immoral, I do think it should be fixed because of the distortion (favouring large businesses, which already generally have advantages due to scale).

It's a bit like how one can be a marxist whilst also choosing to own private property. You can't exist without mimicing society to some extent.

I'm no tax professional, but it sounds like this leak is about a large number of wealthy people actively evading tax, by hiding their assets/source of income and other shady things. This is very illegal, and if true, I imagine some of these people can and will be prosecuted for it.

Tax avoidance is legal, tax evasion isn't.

Apparently the most likely explanation is that by enriching his friends, he wins their loyalty, and they will then buy him whatever he wants. But unfortunately having loyal and rich friends is not illegal nor tax evasion. I don't see how Putin would go down for this even if he lived in the west.

Google for "site:guardian.co.uk double dutch sandwich" or Double Irish

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=site%3Aguardian.co.uk+double+dutch+sand...

So to paraphrase your point:

"It isn't. The point of this is that Apple|Cisco|... is doing it."

In addition Icelandic PM and Cameron's late father.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Treasure-Islands-Uncovering-Offshore-B...).

It does seem like very little will come of this in the western world, and I do agree with your last sentence.

A conspiracy theorist would note the curious timing of this high profile but low impact leak - immediately after the unaoil release implicating a lot of multinationals, even though SZ originally acquired these documents a year ago.

What that means is that if someone has chosen a Swiss bank, which are relatively open and willing to comply with the tax officials from around the world, then they're not hiding anything.

On the other hand, if someone choses Panama, a country that has completely opaque privacy standards and is totally unwilling to comply with requests from tax officials, police, governments, etc then they are very likely to be hiding something they want to keep secret.

This has the potential to be a much bigger story than the Swiss banking leak.

Further discouraging this type of activity likely has indirect effects dwarfing that initial £135 million.

PS: A more realistic estimate is less than 300 people for ~15-90 days to do a quick assessment and rapidly dropping to ~10 people a year out.

Haha what? http://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/04/brinks-mat-how-m...

People move money around for a variety of reasons. Tax fraud, sure. Capital flight for protection of assets from instability or fears of nationalization (Cyprus, for example) is another completely valid reason and I don't see anything wrong with that. At different scales of wealth, a shell company isn't that different from hiding cash in the mattress.

Now, if you're talking about dictators in resource rich banana republics siphoning off riches of their country, then by all means, let those be prosecuted... But how likely is that?

https://twitter.com/georgikantchev/status/716771770636898304...

Tax avoidance is undefinable so this sort of statement is meaningless. The UK can't pay for its infrastructure due to a massive structural deficit. Even if you start defining legal behaviour as immoral and try to grab more money from targeted companies or individuals, the amounts of revenue collected would be trivial compared to the size of the problem - and it'd be a one off hit. Once a country demonstrates that the rule of law is optional, investors start to flee. And that's the sort of avoidance that you can't tackle with any law.

This would need to be checked and balanced, but it effectively makes lower houses (House of Representatives, for example) obsolete.

The Guardian reports the UK Prime Minister's father used the firm.

puts on tinfoil hat: However, with that said, the organizations behind the release could very well have a hidden agenda as they don't seem to have any intention of releasing the full leak.

There's plenty in Russia who believe that while his cronies live off bribes and embezzlement, Putin himself is a Platonic father of the nation. One argument you hear often is he doesn't need to steal anything because he could have everything. This has certain moralistic beauty of a man one with his country. It also provides a way for an average broke Russian to identify with the sacred figure.

Finding out he earmarked some just in case undermines that and suggests Putin himself might not be so certain in near future. And while this revelation will have no immediate social consequence and indeed will be feverishly denied by his supporters, with time it will still sink in.

Why would the anti-russia media focus on one powerful rich person as being bad?

Gee, I wonder...

I bet that the last Tsar followed the same logic..

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during...

If you look more carefully it does list some less known Americans.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vehicle

They're generally referring to legal entities, investments, and particularly the interplay of a network of the above which exercises various features of countries' tax laws in advantageous ways.

The principle of offshore tax shelters is very simple. Countries tax activity that happens in their jurisdiction. Only America tries to tax activity that happens outside of America, and it's attempts to do so have caused huge problems for Americans everywhere (whilst raising trivial amounts of revenue). All other countries recognise that legitimate taxation is inherently region specific: a country that raises taxes from other countries is more properly called an empire.

So countries tax things that happen inside their borders, and countries can set tax rates independently, and the world is full of small countries that don't require much revenue to operate. Hence, if you can shift your business activities from a high tax jurisdiction to a low tax jurisdiction, you can legally pay the lower rates of tax.

Essentially all discussion of tax "avoidance" you may encounter revolves around the inherent difficulty of figuring out where a business actually is. For a person it's easy. A person is where their body is, and simply counting days spent in a country is sufficient to decide on tax residency. For a company it is not so easy because a company can do things in many places simultaneously. The rules that try to resolve this conundrum are extremely vague and thus, easily gamed.

The case of the UK PM's father is instructive. His company had most of its meetings outside of the UK. This allowed them to argue that it wasn't a British company and thus shouldn't pay British taxes. If the British tax collectors want some of that revenue they'd need to argue that actually the business was done in the UK, really. That's a tricky argument.

In the case of companies like Apple or Google, they set things up so their business is done in Ireland. They do this because the Irish people have repeatedly opted to allow very low (effectively zero) rates of corporation tax in order to attract skilled employment to a part of the world that would otherwise be fairly unattractive. Whilst technically Irish corporation taxes are not zero, their rules define the location of a business differently to some other countries, which means arrangements like the Double Irish become possible and that allows for moving profit out of Ireland essentially untaxed. The Irish people know this and allow it, because it has been a very powerful strategy for them and has made Dublin a business center of Europe. Some other countries like to complain about this, stating it's unfair competition, but all countries compete to attract businesses in various ways - often with direct subsidies rather than low tax rates. So their complaints ring somewhat hollow.

In practice the money these big companies stash in the Bahamas will eventually get taxed anyway, because taxes apply when the money moves, and eventually that money will move. Probably back into the USA if/when a 'tax holiday' becomes politically acceptable.