Tag Archives: Panama Papers

$1 trillion in the shade – the annual profits multinational corporations shift to tax havens continues to climb and climb

Looks like paradise – especially if you’re a multinational corporation in need of a tax haven.
LeoPatrizi/E+ via Getty Images

 

Ludvig Wier, University of Copenhagen and Gabriel Zucman, University of California, Berkeley

CC BY-NC-ND

 

About a decade ago, the world’s biggest economies agreed to crack down on multinational corporations’ abusive use of tax havens. This resulted in a 15-point action plan that aimed to curb practices that shielded a large chunk of corporate profits from tax authorities.

But, according to our estimates, it hasn’t worked. Instead of reining in the use of tax havens – countries such as the Bahamas and Cayman Islands with very low or no effective tax rates – the problem has only gotten worse. Continue reading

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Pandora Papers: ‘Biggest-Ever’ Bombshell Leak Exposes Financial Secrets of the Super-Rich

“This is the Panama Papers on steroids.”

By Brett Wilkins, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 10-3-2021

The Pandora Papers were published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and include private emails, secret contracts, and other records obtained during a two-year investigation involving more than 600 journalists in 117 countries and territories. (Image: ICIJ)

In what’s being called the “biggest-ever leak of offshore data,” a cache of nearly 12 million documents published Sunday laid bare the hidden wealth, secret dealings, and corruption of hundreds of world leaders, billionaires, public officials, celebrities, and others.

The bombshell revelations—known as the Pandora Papers—were published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and include private emails, secret contracts, and other records obtained during a two-year investigation involving more than 600 journalists in 117 countries and territories. Continue reading

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Global Offshore Corporate Networks Exposed in Massive Data Leak

By Dan Feldt. Published 12-3-2019 by Unicorn Riot

Hundreds of thousands of documents from inside Formations House, a posh British finance firm located in central London, have been released online tonight. Formations House created thousands of companies for ultra-wealthy business-people for offshore banking and international transactions. The transparency collective ‘Distributed Denial of Secrets‘ obtained these documents from a source dubbed “Babylon” and is publishing them online. More than 100,000 recorded phone calls between Formations House, its customers, and related figures, are included. Full archives of the phone calls are expected to be released in coming days.

This new data release is named ‘#29Leaks’ after 29 Harley Street, the original location in London of Formations House (it moved to a new address after 2016 – the records in this release were generated out of that original location); it’s a prestigious address about a thirty-minute walk from Parliament. Continue reading

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The 1 Percent Under Siege?

By exposing the sheer scale of offshore finance, the Panama Papers have re-fuelled global resentment towards tax-avoiding elites. Are the rich immoral?

By Brooke Harrington. Published by ROAR Magazine

Years before the Panama Papers broke, many of the world’s richest people felt unappreciated and under attack. In 2014, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins compared the position of the rich to that of the Jews in 1930s Germany, warning of a “progressive Kristallnacht” and “a rising tide of hatred of the successful 1 percent.” Though a few of his fellow billionaires distanced themselves from these remarks, several jumped vigorously to his defense, expressing their agreement that the rich were being “pummeled” and “picked on.” Continue reading

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