Fucking painful to read, not because of style but because of the contents. It's more annoying than reading about it in the news when it was happening because back then we still thought it would have an effect. Now it's purely of educational value.

Gemarkeerd

Paul_S | 13 andere besprekingen | Dec 23, 2020 |

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the… door Frederik Obermaier

'Reads like a thriller,' meaning it's fast paced, shallow, interesting, uninformative, and atrociously translated. For goodness sake, one just doesn't use the historical present in English!

A great project, but a mediocre book.

Gemarkeerd

stillatim | 13 andere besprekingen | Oct 23, 2020 |

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the… door Frederik Obermaier

A gripping recount of the Mossac Fonseca involvement in using offshore companies for illegal purposes. Everyone who was anyone seemed to be involved and hundreds of millions of dollars moved around flawlessly.

Gemarkeerd

LindaLeeJacobs | 13 andere besprekingen | Feb 15, 2020 |

The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the… door Frederik Obermaier

Despite the very real continuing abuses born of anti-Semitism, born of racism and sexism and homophobia, there are MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none who are poor. There never have been, and there never will be.
—Alan Moore, Jerusalem

Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier (not related) must have thought all their Christmases had come at once when the Panama Papers data landed in their lap. At some 2.6 terabytes of information, it dwarfed previous data breaches – it's about 100 times the size of all documents ever released by Wikileaks, for example. How do you even start with that mountain of information?

What in fact they did was form a kind of global working group, pulling in journalists from 107 different media companies in eighty countries – and even then they spent more than a year going through the data before publishing.

The data was leaked from a Panamanian company called Mossack Fonseca, which specialises in setting up anonymous shell companies. These shell companies aren't illegal in themselves, but they're easily used to hide money from the authorities, which means they can be a way of evading taxes or – even more dangerously – of bypassing international sanctions. Mossack Fonseca's client list included heads of state, CEOs, African warlords, child rapists and everything in between, and the company was virtually indiscriminate in who they would happily do business with.

The mechanics of how this money is kept hidden and kept anonymous are interesting, but the real takeaways are fairly simple. People who have a very great deal of wealth often simply don't bother paying taxes on most of it; they live in a world which has completely different rules, and governments who try to pursue them will soon find themselves under pressure from banks, multinationals, and the super-rich – what the Swiss campaigner Jean Ziegler calls ‘the world dictatorship of globalized financial capital’.

The offshore system is therefore doubly detrimental. On the one hand, it is used to directly finance some of the most dangerous and destructive people in the world: it poses, as the Brothers Obermay/ier put it, ‘an existential threat to millions of people’. And on the other hand, it is the driver for a kind of neofeudal redistribution of money – in Nicholas Shaxson's words, the ‘biggest force for shifting wealth and power from the poor to the rich in history’.

What struck me most forcefully was something that was not even really spelled out, it's so obvious: that so many of the people in power are so very rich. The problem is not just that some of our leaders are bad or immoral – it's that all of them have great wealth combined with a stream of opportunities to cheat the system.

It is tempting to nod cynically over these revelations, but this is, I think, just another form of complaisancy. Anger is better. Cynics would also do well to note how, despite fears over ‘mainstream media’, there are still hundreds of newspapers and broadcasters that will devote enormous time and resources to investigations like this, even when they contain damaging information about their own proprietors (which was sometimes the case here). But they depend on a public response.

And in this case, there was a response – the Icelandic premier was forced out, Spanish ministers resigned, and a string of scandals and new legislation was generated across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. (Mossack Fonseca themselves very sadly had to close down earlier this year, after suffering the ‘economic and reputational damage’ they so richly deserved.)

Of course, Mossack Fonseca was only one of many similar firms. But the tone is welcome: there are possible solutions, there are angles of attack, and The Panama Papers spells them out. This book manages to give you an unprecedented insight into what we're up against, but it doesn't neglect to show that there are still a few ways, at least, to envisage making a real change.… (meer)