Are the Russians Actually Behind the Panama Papers?
brookings.edu
brookings.edu
from http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2014/mr-putin-2nd-ed...
> For anyone wishing to understand Russia’s evolution since the breakup of the Soviet Union and its trajectory since then, the book you hold in your hand is an essential guide. —John McLaughlin, former deputy director of U.S. Central Intelligence
Certainly more proof and more intuitively plausible than any theory presented in his article.
Even if he had proof he wouldn't have a point. There seems to be no end to the parade of people saying how "our" interests are harmed by these publications. If your org is corrupt, I want it to be destabilized. I want you to fear personal exposure.
Are they criminal? Having an offshore company generally isn’t illegal. There may be questions about how some political figures' (for example) funds were obtained in the first place, but the mere existence of funds in some tax-advantaged vehicles is no evidence of a crime.
gosh, one would think that some of the funds might be ill-gotten proceeds from criminal enterprises, but if the use of off-shore entities are prima facie evidence of criminal intent, then I'm in trouble.
Fair enough. There was.
> Anyway, I'm not a lawyer
Are you sure? Your very first sentence sounded very lawyer-like! :-)
Everyone knows that Russia is corrupt up to the top. How? Pretty much every top politician (and their families) in russia own far more than can be purchased on a state salary. Spokes person for Kremlin is spotted wearing 700,000 Euro watch when his official salary is less than 1/10 of that.
A lot of Russian government officials and their inner circles own multi-million dollar properties in: London, Spain, New York, Boston etc. Their families live in the west, their kids go to schools in usa and europe...
Panama papers disclose how these multi million bribes and shady dealings are accepted and how money is transferred and used to buy up assets overseas. Good old days of a bribe in a suitcase are gone... Its hard to fit $300mil of cash in a suitcase (well Italians would argue lol).
IT IS very suspicious that no high profile Americans were caught in this release... It is possible that USA players simply use different entities to set up shell corps and transfer money using different channels.
Putin was at the top of the revelations, even if the news was unsurprising (but like the Snowden documents, it's not because we all suspected it that the proof is any less valuable).
If the guy who did it is not US authorities, I would not not sleep well if I was him. The police in London regularly picks up the hung or poisoned bodies of those who dared to attack or expose Putin...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35998801
Switzerland
Hong Kong
USA
Singapore
The Cayman Islands
Luxembourg
Lebanon
Germany
Bahrain
United Arab Emirates
Panama seems to be down at the low-rent end of the financial secrecy market.
So no - the OP is not only not plausible, but raises more questions than it answers.
Practically, I'd expect a Russian hack to specifically target the tax affairs of Putin's enemies.
This may yet happen now, with Russian and/or Chinese hackers targeting the tax secrets of prominent Western politicians - which would be an interesting development for everyone.
Personally I am a libertarian. I am concerned by the death of privacy and the increasing overreach of governments. I don't really see this drive toward transparency and bullying of countries offering financial secrecy as a good thing.
I have seen or heard of many people who have gone through WW2 and have hidden money in Switzerland. Not to hide money from the taxman. But because they have seen how the governments can easily turn against their citizens and decided they needed a plan B. This concept of "nowhere to hide" is a bit concerning.
Presumably you are talking about Roberto Calvi and Alexander Litvinenko.
While two murders that could be linked to the Russian state are two too many, describing this as 'regularly' seems a bit of a stretch.
That being said, I agree that Putin is near the top of my "people who should not be messed with" list.
There is also Mikhail Lesin in the US.
And these are the ones we know about...
Pretty much that, as well as the fact that Americans are world leaders in tax compliance and these people are three sigma tax dodgers, so there will be disproportionately less Americans among them.
This was script-kiddie stuff - it could've been anyone from a teenager in Wisconsin to a couple of channers in Bangkok and Banjul in it for the lulz.
Anyway, any speculation on the source is just a distraction from the content.
The theory is "we're good. Anyone we don't like is bad"
The evidence collection goes "confirms our theory, it's true." Or " Contradicts it, we either ignore it our dismiss it"
Case in point, the unaoil scandal is much more serious than anything in these Panama papers, it involves "the good guys" and it's largely forgotten a week after it release.
* ironically enough RT is (was?) pushing the theory that the CIA is behind it because there are no notable American on the list. So it's a KGB/CIA plot because Putin/Americans come out relatively unscathed
They'll print the juicier bits, but buried deep were few except geeks and junkies like me will read it.
Another two techniques that infuriate me:
1. Editing published articles after they are published and making the original unavailable. (Editing should look like word's auto-track feature: in bright red)
2. Not following up on a story after you launched salvos into a person/ideas truth worthiness and they are vindicated
edit: Hah! Downvotes. I read RT. I read WSJ (even OpEds sometimes, but I don't enjoy it). I read AJ. I read NYT. I read from many sources and high degree of skepticism of all of them. But if you read RT regularly, I doubt you're the one downvoting.
But I don't live in Russia so Putin can't harm me. Therefore, I'm not scared of them.
However, it is an invaluable source to know what we're doing. RT wants to discredit the West, and there is too much truthful material for them to work with for to have to fudge too much.
[1] although is disagree with you there is no western equivalent. I used to be a big fan of the WSJ, NYT and The Economist, after Syria and the Snowden leaks, they have become unreadable. Only The Intercept is left (npr gets a pass because I have a 40 minute drive to work)
I think as bad as the mainstream US media source you mentioned can be, they're still not equivalent on the whole. Wish they weren't so actively trying to close the gap, though...
edit: there are sources as bad, and there are source as prominent, but I don't think any are in the intersection. Honestly, it's more of hand-waving/gut feel on my part, though.
But Orwell wouldn't be surprised a bit of quid pro quo. Both are power structures, in competition, ultimately trying to preserve their own controll.
It just raises questions rather than deflecting them. Putin does not seem so stupid. Why would he do this?
It's like getting pulled over for a speeding ticket and saying "I didn't kill him, there's no evidence, this is a plot against me".
But we recieved nothing about america. We have recieved some stuff about the UK but 30k of taxed money is not illegal at all.
After thinking about it, I think you're right on this. I'm evaluating it as bad international PR when it's probably more internal propaganda.
Within Europe, all email, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London then by Satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill in the North York Moors of the UK. The system was first uncovered in the 1970's by a group of researchers in the UK (Campbell, 1981).
Other work on what is now known as Signals intelligence was undertaken by researchers such as James Bamford, which uncovered a billion dollar world wide interceptions network, which he nicknamed 'Puzzle Palace'. A recent work by Nicky Hager, Secret Power, (Hager,1996) provides the most comprehensive details to date of a project known as ECHELON. Hager interviewed more than 50 people concerned with intelligence to document a global surveillance system that stretches around the world to form a targeting system on all of the key Intelsat satellites used to convey most of the world's satellite phone calls, internet, email, faxes and telexes. These sites are based at Sugar Grove and Yakima, in the USA, at Waihopai in New Zealand, at Geraldton in Australia, Hong Kong, and Morwenstow in the UK.
The ECHELON system forms part of the UKUSA system but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the cold war, ECHELON is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organisations and businesses in virtually every country. The ECHELON system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of communications and then siphoning out what is valuable using artificial intelligence aids like Memex. to find key words. Five nations share the results with the US as the senior partner under the UKUSA agreement of 1948, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are very much acting as subordinate information servicers.
European Parliament, 1998, An appraisal of technologies for political control, https://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm
In fact the ideal arrangement for me as a non-government entity is all the government entities constantly smearing each other.
It would be nice to get more of the full picture at least.
If it was the Russians, why would we look at the leak as "evil" rather than praising them for doing so? Maybe more Americans should be leaking this sort of information.
First, all of its reasoning will fall apart if we examine its premises.
>there is no evidence of Putin’s direct involvement—not in any company involved in the leak, much less in criminal activity, theft, tax evasion, or money laundering. There are documents showing that some of his “friends” have moved “up to two billion dollars” through these Panama-based shell companies.
This isn't true and the author is either deliberately lying or is simply misinformed. What we are talking here are $2b moving through the account in the name of a professional cellist Roldugin. Roldugin is a close friend of Putin and he already denied on record that he owns any big business besides his performances. Those $2b came from various shady deals such as:
- an agreement to buy a bunch of Rosneft stocks which is almost immediately terminated, with $750k in punitive damages being paid to a Roldugin's company;
- an agreement to collect an outstanding debt of 4 billion roubles (around $50m) from Rostelekom (state-owned telecom company), which cost $1 (yeah, one dollar) to the offshore company;
- a shell company providing a debt of $6m to Roldugin's offshore and forgiving it after a few months for $1.
A single deal like this is possible but improbable. Two billion dollars of such deals are impossible and they scream "corruption" and "bribe", and there is no single official in Russia that will demand bribes of this order of magnitude except Putin. Even if it's not him, either he is clueless (and the article in question doesn't make sense) or he knows about it and is okay with it (and therefore he is involved).
>But nothing in the Panama Papers reveals anything new about Putin. It is in fact far less of a story than has been alleged for a long time. For over 10 years, there have been suspicions that Putin has a vast personal fortune, claimed at first to be $20 billion, then $40, $70, even $100… And now all they find is “maybe” a couple of billion belonging to a friend?
This passage implies equality of "allegations" and documents detailing business transactions. I'm not sure if I even need to debunk this, but let's recast it a bit: "It's widely alleged that 9/11 was organized by the government because jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Therefore, documents detailing CIA communication with 9/11 terrorists are nothing new and aren't a big deal". Does it even make sense?
>A “friend of Putin” is linked to companies that channel a couple of billion dollars through the offshore companies. Why? To evade Russian taxes? Really? To conceal ownership? From whom? You don’t need an offshore registration to do that. To evade sanctions? That’s a credible reason, but it makes sense only if the companies were registered after mid-2014. Were they?
I like how the author waves away "to conceal ownership" part as if it's a non-issue. It's a pretty big deal because every dictator wants to a) have a backup plan and for this, they need a safe and anonymous place to hide their money away from their country and b) pass the money to their children so they can spend them somewhere. It's not like you can just load up trucks with $50 bills in Kremlin. However, in general, Western countries don't exactly support this and see such funds as a lever, so you need a concealment.
The rest of the article builds upon this premises, which are false. Therefore, it's all false.
Second, what wonders me is the fact that some Westerners are fascinated by Putin and his cronies. It shows up in the way the author speaks about "Russian hacking capabilities" or Putin's implied geopolitical prowess. No, there is nothing to be fascinated about. Those are people who are managed to waste a golden rain of oil money down the drain (just look at the photos of a typical 1m+ Russian city Omsk [1]) while destroying and corrupting every civic institute in the country. It's a typical reactive behavior of a plutocratic rule that got lucky with oil prices and now tries to stay afloat while having no regard for a wellbeing of their own citizens. I don't believe statesmen like this are even remotely worthy of admiration, and yet some do admire them. This is something beyond my understanding.
From what I've observed, the Russian political class is not particularly concerned with hiding financial corruption.