Secrecy World (Now the Major Motion Picture THE LAUNDROMAT)

November 6, 2017
Bernstein, a reporter on the Pulitzer Prize–winning team that broke the Panama Papers story, pulls back the curtain on a shadowy underworld of tax havens, offshore accounts, and shell companies in this heavily detailed yet surprisingly bloodless exposé of the illicit financial system and its 2015 collapse at the hands of anonymous leakers. Bernstein begins with the story of Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm at the center of this web of criminal activity. He explains how the rise of the superwealthy in the 1980s and 1990s led to a new market in secrecy. By taking advantage of the services offered by such firms as Mossack Fonseca, wealthy individuals could store art, launder money, and avoid taxes with impunity—until a few rogue journalists brought the whole thing crashing down. Bernstein’s revelatory source material, including interviews and secret videotapes, demonstrates the extent to which global banks such as HSBC were complicit in unlawful activities. However, the brief introduction and epilogue rush by too quickly to do justice to the complex material in the middle. Bernstein’s book should be a juicy read, but its plodding pace and monotone prose turns it into a dossier.

A searching look at the tangled, deeply buried financial network exposed by the publication of the so-called Panama Papers.Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Bernstein (co-author: Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, 2006), a reporter with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, recounts the story that the millions of documents leaked from a Panamanian law firm tell about how corporations and wealthy individuals hide their money in offshore accounts. As he notes, that firm has its origins in the Third Reich, when a former SS commando made his way to Latin America, "a beacon for former Nazis following Germany's defeat," and became an expert in maritime law. His partner in Mossack Fonseca had long roots in Panama's political class as well as a fearless embrace of a questionable clientele--arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, for one. "In Panama, moral flexibility was a professional selling point," writes Bernstein; the country has a long history of catering to an international criminal cohort in exchange for a cut of the action. Mossack Fonseca, by the author's account, went headfirst into the business of parking massive fortunes in places where they supposedly would not be detected: the Seychelles, Liechtenstein, the British Virgin Islands. As "Mossfon" grew, it expanded its markets to places like China, whose wealthy had been sheltering money in Panama and Liberia but needed a new haven with the fall of Manuel Noriega and Samuel Doe; Mossfon obliged with fake foundations, silent partnerships, and a range of other strategies, some quite illegal. As its influence grew, others came into Mossfon's orbit--including members of Vladimir Putin's circle and, it seems, of Donald Trump's as well. Bernstein alleges that "Trump had long made a practice of consorting with dodgy characters for financial gain, so Mossfon wouldn't have been a stretch. In the months since his election, notes the author, it has been difficult to distinguish whether the administration's actions are in the public or private interest.Mossfon remains a maze worthy of a Cretan palace, but Bernstein does first-rate work in providing a map to a scandal that has yet to unfold completely.

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