The premise here is very solid- shut down the small number of people that the Oligarchs depend on, and their ability to operate is curtailed much more effectively than trying to attack the oligarchs directly.
I'd argue this paper is less a work of scholarship than an example of collusive, astroturfed, agitprop, where even though russia's oligarchs are an easy target because they are still new money and retain the taint of trade from the corruption that produced their fortunes, the authors are casting aspersions on highly regulated businesses that provide the financial rails for investing and preserving pensions and sovereign wealth.
The only reason you can insure anything or have long term financial instruments at all is because of special purpose vehicles that persist longer than the whims of a given regional governing party. These vehicles are infrastructure that provides financial stability for capital flows that facilitate social stability and growth. I remember the eurozone sovereign debt crisis', and to me the paper just looks like another (tawdry) setup for blaming "speculators and international financiers" for the failed technocratic policies of their peers own makings.
The approach of "going upstream," is guilt by association, and it's unprincipled overreach. The paper is entertaining, and I'm glad that the networkX python library has become so accessible that social activists can use it, but I think we should hold the authors to a higher standard.
Reality is that tax dodging is a wildly out of control problem, and worse it is considered to be de defacto standard to even run a business at all. From south Dakota to the city of London and beyond. It is really a problem
Oligarchs owning property in London are not forced to contribute to the London coffers .... not at all
https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/council-tax/council...
Yachts are useful for that.
They can't, and if they have their own currency, their debt never comes due because they can steal it from savers through inflation. But they prefer to play this game, and that requires trading that debt to someone, and those someones are pension funds and other governments who use these vehicles in jurisdictions that can't easily be looted by said debtor states. The last government to collapse because of tax evasion was Greece, and the reason people evaded there was because it was complex, inconsistent and corrupt. The evasion facilities were built in by design, usually under the auspices of "justice," for favoured parties. The state is happy because when everyone is compromised, they have the discretion to step around the laws and always get someone on something, and blackmail and extortion are more efficient than courts.
That said, this perspective is from a basic disagreement in principle with managerialism. We pay what we are legally obligated to, and if the rules are so complex as to be inconsistent and exploitable, and governments are too mercurial to risk leaving capital within their reach, it's their own fault. The whole rich-people-bad argument is ugly and insincere because it advocates an extortionate state that panders to smaller human urges, and so I don't have a lot of tolerance for it.