The Panama Papers

August 15, 2016
A reporter at Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper gets an anonymous text message that asks, "Interested in data?" So begins the saga of the Panama Papers, the largest leak of information to journalists in history. Obermayer encourages his contact, "John Doe," whose disclosures pull back the curtain on the dealings of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which, over several decades, helped set up hundreds of thousands of shell companies for a global array of famousâand infamousâclients. The resulting investigation into 11.5 million documents, assisted by the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists, topples multiple political figures, including Iceland's prime minister, and implicates public figures and major companies from around the world. Despite the challenge of summing up the work of over 320 reporters from over 70 countries, the coauthors, both Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters, present a straightforward account that involves German banks, soccer superstar Lionel Messi, African dictators, China's new elite, and Vladimir Putin's inner circle. This book is a fascinating first look at a scandal that may be the beginning of the end of the opaque and dodgy offshore finance industry.

Hiding money in offshore accounts to keep it from the publicans is an old trick--but it is now so prevalent that, far from being "a minor part of our economic system," it is the system.The saga of the so-called Panama Papers, so much in the recent news, begins with the anonymous leaking of secret documents to Suddeutsche Zeitung journalist Obermayer. The leak became a flood that, writes Luke Harding, of Edward Snowden fame, in his foreword, "eventually amounted to 11.5 million documents, delivered in real-time installments," a trove far larger than the Snowden files. These records pertained to 214,000 offshore shell companies whose businesses were filtered through a Panamanian law firm, but that the flood came pouring down on German journalists spoke to the fact that the principal was a German emigre who may now be on the hook for violations of European Union regulations as a German citizen. (The legal case has only begun to unfold.) Yet Mossack Fonseca's clients, the beneficiaries of various schemes to keep taxable income under wraps, are breathtakingly international: they include the father of Britain's prime minister, much of Iceland's government, Nicaragua's president, and even the "best footballer in the world," to say nothing of "trails leading to FIFA and its president...various mafia organizations, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda...and to Vladimir Putin." Throw in numerous multinational corporations "like Amazon, Starbucks, and Apple," and you have splendid testimony to Karl Marx's observation that capital has no country and that capitalists are loyal only unto themselves and their shareholders. In surveying these many trails, the authors expose a shockingly corrupt system but not without offering twofold remedies, one of which is to mandate "an effective system for the automatic global exchange of information about bank accounts." A maddening, important indictment of the shadow economy that flourishes even as the legitimate economy suffers and just the thing to tip a person debating whether to join the Occupy movement or vote for Bernie Sanders over the edge. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.