Reality surpasses imagination
, עודכן
The biggest journalist expose in history. That's how the enormous Panama Papers leak can be described.
The papers detail the dark paths of the money of several heads of state, encompassing figures close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Syrian President Bashar Assad (who slaughters his people and makes billions at the same time), politicians, millionaires, and famous athletes, including soccer superstar Lionel Messi.
Whenever we think we've seen it all, a bigger expose comes along and shows us that reality surpasses anything we could imagine. This expose demonstrates how legitimate money, along with "gray" money (from tax violations) flirted with black money from corruption and organized crime. And Putin? Again, he's in the picture of almost any story today. According to the expose, the man allowed his cronies to launder over a billion dollars. Is he an altruist, or what?
Maybe this is the place to note that a tax haven per se is not illegal. A tax haven is a country whose tax rates are low or nonexistent, so businesspeople choose to divert income to that country. Sometimes it's part of legitimate tax planning, but the idea today is to curtail the use of tax havens because of what they could be used for, which has led to many new laws. The problem is that these countries facilitate tax evasion and money laundering. The line between legal and illegal is very thin and often crossed.
To understand the scope of the story, let's think for a moment that 106 newspapers in 76 countries were given access to a vast amount of material from the archives of the Panamanian company Mossack Fonseca, which specializes in tax havens for wealthy clients, who obviously had millions to hide. This monumental expose lets us see the near-parallel economy that exists in the world. A dark economy, which managed to flourish from 1977 to 2015.
We thought that the WikiLeaks documents were a huge revelation. Just to illustrate, the story before us contains 1,500 times the amount of material exposed by WikiLeaks. We're talking about 11.5 million documents. Amazing. Media outlets have never been allowed to pore over so much material. If a tax haven is a paradise for the wealthy, the Panama Papers are paradise for investigative journalists.
Many people will doubtless have to give answers or lose a few zeros from their personal wealth, and some politicians will also obviously lose their positions.
The expose began with the Munich newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, but no newspaper can handle such an immense amount of material, which was supposed to have remained secret forever, on its own. Some of the names involved are no longer alive: Moammar Gadhafi, for example. Others are no longer in power, like the Mubarak family.
The ground is burning beneath the feet of Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, soccer star Lionel Messi (as if Real Madrid's loss on Saturday wasn't bad enough), and even the suspended president of UEFA, Michel Platini (who is ending his career on a shameful note).
Just like the exposes of spying and wiretapping, it's hard to say we are surprised or didn't know. Everyone knows that the thing was going on -- but when it's blown open, you're amazed. What might have been the biggest money laundering conduit has been revealed to ordinary people, the ones who get up in the morning, make sandwiches for their kids, send them to school, and pay taxes. They pay. The others don't.
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