![]() ![]() Then, of course, there is the salacious account of a woman said to have had a child by Vladimir Putin and ended up owning a rather expensive property in Monaco. Other big names include Jordan’s King Abdullah who has reportedly bought properties worth over $100 million in California and London, Dutch finance minister Wopke Hoekstra, the Czech Prime Minister, as well as celebrities like Shakira and Elton John. Foremost among these are Tony Blair, the former UK Prime Minister and his wife. They implicate leaders who have condemned the offshore financial havens but now hypocritically are shown to be exploiting what they have referred to as loopholes. The titillating headlines are well known. Another question is perhaps the simplest: why is this sort of thing allowed to happen at all? The obvious question is, will these revelations amount to anything in the sense of bringing those engaged in corruption and crime to account? A secondary inquiry concerns the implications of this type of activity that drains resources from countries desperately in need of capital, and why this type of work by journalists is necessary, indeed critical. In passing, he noted that the number of public officials involved may be double the above estimate. These papers comprised about 100 million pages in total, said Gerard Ryle, the director of ICIJ in an appearance on the program ‘On The Media’ on WNYC, a New York City Public Radio station. The Pandora Papers are a collation of almost 12 million confidential documents leaked from 14 firms of lawyers, advisors and other professionals. In other words, when it comes to parking money and concealing where and how it is parked, it is business as usual. The amount of money said to be held in tax havens has been estimated to be as much as $6 to $36 trillion. Some 130 billionaires, 29,000 accounts, 90 countries, and more than 330 public officials are implicated. ![]() What is staggering about the Pandora Papers is that they dwarf the revelations of the Panama Papers. ![]() Or perhaps the only thing that has changed is that there are today more tax havens than there were five years ago. This past week the ICIJ has released the Pandora Papers, showing that when it comes to concealing assets in tax havens not much has changed. Some five and one-half years ago, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released the Panama Papers, revealing offshore financial dealings of such scope as to shock the world. With so much money at stake, there is little incentive to change ![]()
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