By now, you’ve likely heard about the Pandora Papers — the landmark reporting on financial secrecy havens, corruption, and the hidden wealth brought to you by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its 140 media partners worldwide.
This isn’t the ICIJ’s first rodeo: they’re the same consortium that brought us the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, leaks from the world’s tax havens and the elite law and accounting firms that enable the wealthy and powerful to live by different rules from the rest of us.
Each of these leaks have been almost unimaginably large: millions of documents, the otherwise invisible paper-trail left by likewise unimaginably vast fortunes amassed by the 0.1%. The scale and scope of these secrets makes them too big for any one news org to report out.
Hence the ICIJ, a consortium of hundreds of news organizations around the world, who bring both the raw human labor-hours and the specific, regional knowledge of the oligarchs implicated in the leaks to the reporting.
The ICIJ’s earlier landmark publications dealt with gargantuan leaks — but Pandora Papers are galactic, 29,000 accounts leaked from 14 offshore firms from all over the world: Panama, Seychelles, Hong Kong, Belize, BVI, Cyprus, Switzerland, Dubai.
The arrangements themselves are characteristic of this kind of elite “financial planning,” which is to say they are idiotically complex, with companies in one country owning companies in another, which own companies in a third.
Each of these arrangements represents a risible fiction: a shell company is a business, a business is a person, that person resides in a file-drawer in the desk of a bank official on some distant treasure island.
10-figure assets can be owned by no one, until the instant some great beast liquidates them, whereupon these mysterious riches can be fully and incontrovertibly controlled by them, but only until the paperwork is signed, whereupon the assets disappear into mystery again.
These arrangements, complexified by their own sake by deranged lawyers and accountants, have various names. Finance regulators and their prey call this MEGO (“my eyes glaze over”). Merely reciting the schemes’ details plunges the listener into a drugged stupor.
I like Dana Claire’s version better, though: “The shield of boringness” — when a straightforwardly corrupt and unsupportable arrangement is armored by layers of pointless complexity.
Some things are hard to understand because they’re complicated — others are complicated so they’ll be hard to understand.
The ICIJ and its partners have done incredible work in trying to penetrate the shield of boringness.
Here’s their Twitter thread, summing up the headline findings:
Reading these guides will give you the top-line findings, like the fact that Andrej Babis, the Czech Republic’s billionaire president, a self-styled “populist corruption fighter” who is up for re-election, used financial secrecy vehicles to acquire a $22m French chateau.
Or that Cherie and Tony Blair avoided £312,000 in tax by buying a multi-million-pound London townhouse for Cherie’s law practice through an offshore shell company owned by an ultrawealthy Bahraini pal of Tony Blair’s.
There’s more — Putin cronies, mafia hitmen, even Shakira (!), all using these offshore secrecy vehicles to buy and sell assets around the world.
I’m not going to rehearse all the scandals here — ICIJ and its partners have done a better job of it than I ever can.
Instead, I want to explore two recurring themes in the reporting.
First, the legality of these arrangements. Over and over again, in all the media organizations’ reports on these leaks, they stress that most of these financial MEGO shenanigans are legal.
What they mean is, these ultrawealthy people and their procurers have found a way to operate by a different set of laws from you and me. As with Propublica’s IRS Files, these leaks reveal two, separate parallel legal-financial systems.
There’s a public system, the one you and I send an appreciable chunk of our annual income to, as part of the cost of living in a civilized world where there is fiscal space for public spending on roads, schools, hospitals, public health, firefighting and other necessities.
Then there’s the other system, a system that operates in the shadows, a system you need millions and millions to participate in, a system that lets you pay little tax, no tax, or even negative tax — when states and countries hand working people’s money over to the 0.1%.
When these arrangements come to light, its practicioners — plutocrats, elite enablers, captured regulators — always mount the same defense: “This ultra-secret parallel legal system is perfectly legal.” They’re (usually) not lying.
The legality is the true scandal. These leaks reveal, time and again, is that we live under the conservative ideology so summarized by Frank Wilhoit, with “in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
The beneficiaries of the secret, parallel elite legal system are its architects. The same City of London law firms and banks that sit at the center of these corrupt hairballs also lobby like hell for the creation and expansion of the secret legal system.
The Pandora Papers implicate finance ministers of Pakistan, the Netherlands, Brazil, Malta and France. Of course this corruption is legal — it’s being practiced by the people who write the laws! The King of Jordan’s bullshit is legal because he’s the fucking King of Jordan.
I’ll say it again: the legality of these scams is the true scandal. Ex-UK PM Tony Blair and his wife did something perfectly legal when they ducked hundreds of thousands in tax — they exploited a loophole that Tony Blair could have closed, but didn’t.
Blair — who transformed the Labour Party into an organisation that celebrated the “accomplishments” of billionaires — talks a lot about the evils of tax evasion, but Blair was PM for a decade. If he cared about tax evasion, he’d have closed these loopholes.
The other point to make is that “offshore” is a huge misnomer. The relationship of tiny, poor, finance-blighted tax-havens to the ultra-rich is as a kind of pinball flipper. They exist to make momentary contact with vast fortunes and then fire them off across the ocean.
The Aliyevs are brutal oligarchs who control Azerbaijan. They laundered £400m through distant tax havens, but the money landed in the United Kingdom, where they have bought up vast tracts of land — flipping some of it to the Queen of England’s Crown Estates.
The King of Jordan’s money ricochets from island to island, but it comes to rest — shrouded in secrecy — in Malibu, California, London, and Ascot, where he owns mansion upon mansion upon mansion.
The “offshore” money is firmly onshore. Just as Apple’s untaxed offshore billions were laundered into assets including US Treasury Bills, these dead-eyed monsters own huge swathes of LA, London, New York, Paris, Toronto, Vancouver…
What’s more, the enablers who wax fat by helping the corrupt navigate the secret law system are are largely at arm’s length — for example, many of the clients who fled Mossack Fonseca after the Panama Papers now own shell companies administered from the City of London.
The tax havens are increasingly onshore. Cyprus — the laundry of choice for corrupt Russian billions — isn’t a Caribbean island far from the jurisdiction of European tax investigators. It’s an EU member state, fully signed up to tax and law-enforcement treaties.
The American states are hotbeds of onshore-offshore corruption. Over and over, the Pandora Papers reference South Dakota’s role in helping the ultra-rich hide their wealth from the rest of us, enabling them to remain behind the secret legal system’s curtain.
South Dakota, in turn, is merely the current winner in the US states’ race to the bottom on enabling finance corruption. The granddaddy of corrupt state finance is Delaware, or, as Joe Biden calls it, “The corporate state of Delaware.”
In many ways, Delaware is yesterday’s news — legislatures in Nevada and Wyoming have passed suites of financial-secrecy-friendly laws that make Delaware look like a model of financial transparency and corporate control — only to be surpassed by the South Dakota state house.
“Offshore” is bullshit. The call is coming from inside the house.
And the business about how this is all legal? It’s also bullshit. Yes, there are plenty of people who manage these corrupt arrangements without breaking laws, but that’s not the whole story.
Over and over, the Pandora Papers show the same procurers, banks, and structures that are used by “law abiding” plutes are also being used by literal murderers like “Lell the Fat One,” a mafia hitman, and corrupt officials who embezzle billions from government treasuries.
These systems aren’t kept secret because the people who design, operate and use them are planning to share them with us later and don’t want to ruin the surprise.
They know that they’re shady as fuck, and they know they’ve created a system whose beneficiaries include murderers and thieves. They know that the secret legal system is only legal because it’s secret.
They know it is so manifestly unjust and unfair that it could never withstand public scrutiny. The legal, offshore system of finance crimes is neither legal, nor offshore. It’s all around us, and it’s crooked as hell.
Holy shit y’all. Also, watch “The Big Short” for a really concrete example of how these shell games played at the highest levels led to you and I losing our homes circa 2007.
