These "leaks" are annoying. They just give you a page with virtually no information, just a chart showing some connection. Release everything. Don't insult my intelligence by deciding for me what to release.
I don't think they are trying to insult anyone's intelligence though. They are just being careful with the data so that their sources are safe.
While safety is important, this reminds me of the story of the boy who cried wolf. If they keep doing this multiple times and there is no substantial info., people will stop paying attention when there is some real info. and demagogues will use this as evidence of fake news.
I'm not exactly sure how that's a big deal, nothing there implies they avoid taxes or anything. (Maybe the fund they invest in does shady things, but it doesn't look like they have any kind of weird offshore setup)
No, not everyone. And not everyone evades or optimises tax either.
It's particularly egregious in the case of ostensibly not-for-profit educational institutions.
Tax authorities usually struggle to reconstruct the entire chain, so they don't prosecute... until somebody else does the job for them, and then they piggyback.
Is your concern that their interpretation of the source material is inaccurate, or that you're being intentionally misled or occluded?
The ICIJ has been around for two decades, and their credibility is robust. I don't think they're likely to be making claims like this without access to substantial evidence.
While the documents may be interesting to you and others, they're not yours to disseminate. If the graph is meaningless to you, then you should ignore it.
I note that the Australian Tax Office published a press release [1] earlier this month around the Paradise Papers. Presumably other nation state revenue collection agencies have released similar, or at least have comparable expectations from this latest set of papers.
Reading between the lines, there's an expectation that a release of the entire set of source papers may reduce the efficacy of their efforts to recover these lost revenues. I concede that I may be optimistic in my interpretation and expectations here.
[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/Media-centre/Media-releases/ATO-state...
Do you know that?
Also, I certainly wouldn't agree that journalism isn't complex.
And it's absolutely the case that most journalists covering complex domains don't have an educational background in the domain, and in most domains the market doesn't really reward development of domain expertise (in political reporting, there's some pressure driving reporters to develop some expertise in electoral politics, but that's kind of exceptional, and isn't reflected in other domains, even the policy end of political reporting.)
Also, I know people like to criticize journalists (despite having no domain expertise in journalism), but let's raise our standards to making well-supported, informative statements:
> A journalist without domain expertise or the support of a domain expert without an agenda related to the subject-matter of the reporting is crippled ...
A developer who is illiterate also is limited, but that isn't meaningful. It tells us nothing about any particular developer or about the population of developers.
> it's absolutely the case that most journalists covering complex domains don't have an educational background in the domain
That's a very broad statement, about every journalist who covers every "complex" domain. How many have backgrounds in what domains?
And it implies that lacking educational background means they don't understand the field they cover. Certainly that's not true. Many people I know lack an educational background in their professions; many Silicon Valley legends have no educational background. Some lawyers run large companies, including financial companies, despite lacking MBAs or any financial education. As I wrote in another HN post, Herbert Simon won a Nobel Prize in Economics, won a Turing Award, wrote the book on industrial organization, was a leader in cognitive psychology, and his educational background was political science.
A journalist who has covered finance for decades certainly has domain expertise.
They don't release original documents, but still pretty good.