Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) has released the biggest leak in journalistic history, posting 11.5 million documents from a Panamanian law firm online and providing “rare insights into a world that can only exist in the shadows.”

SZ said it received the law firm’s documents a year ago from an anonymous source who “wanted neither financial compensation nor anything else in return.”

The German paper obtained further documents in an investigation that followed, involving “400 journalists from more than 100 media organizations in over 80 countries.”

SZ said it decided to analyze the data in cooperation with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Biggest leak in the history of data journalism just went live, and it's about corruption.https://t.co/dYNjD6eIeZpic.twitter.com/638aIu8oSU

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 3, 2016

 

The data in the so-called Panama Papers, “provides rare insights into a world that can only exist in the shadows. It proves how a global industry led by major banks, legal firms, and asset management companies secretly manages the estates of the world’s rich and famous: from politicians, FIFA officials, fraudsters and drug smugglers, to celebrities and professional athletes,” the German newspaper wrote.

 

 

Here are the famous politicians in ‘the Wikileaks of the mega-rich’#PanamaPapershttps://t.co/Ll2wyPj9KCpic.twitter.com/hRzKA0arBP

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 3, 2016

 

The information in the leak covers the activities of the Mossack Fonseca firm over a period from the 1970s to spring 2016.

“The Panama Papers include approximately 11.5 million documents – more than the combined total of the Wikileaks Cablegate, Offshore Leaks, Lux Leaks, and Swiss Leaks,” SZ said.

The data is presented in the form of e-mails, pdf files, photo files, and excerpts from the Panaman firm’s database.

That time when your journalism was so hot it melted the servers.#PanamaPapershttps://t.co/AkCPAh6EEI

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 3, 2016

The leak claims to expose the offshore holdings of 12 current and former world leaders, including prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, the president of Ukraine, and the king of Saudi Arabia.

It also provides data on the financial activities of 128 other politicians and public officials from different countries. Associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin were also identified for allegedly having operated shell firms.

https://www.rt.com/news/338270-panama-papers-corruption-report/

 

Here we are in a world where corruption seems to be the norm, all we need now is expose  our own trail of hidden cash. But Malcolm does not want to have a federal ICAC style investigative house. He is happy to bash the Unions... so his mates can make more cash while workers are less secure and less safe at work. As that site Linkedin tells us rich people take enormous risks (usually with other people's money aka Mister the Trump) so our primal Turnbum wants workers to do so as well. Security of employment is a thing of the past as you have to tighten your butt. 

No information on this scandal yet on Wikileaks... I think they are waiting to see if these Süddeutsche Zeitung papers are bogus (a bit like those dossiers created to tell us saddam had weapons of mass destruction) or not as we all should.

 

 

 

Quite extraordinary... The Süddeutsche Zeitung Panama papers don't mention ONE SINGLE AMERICAN (USA — plenty of Latinos in there) PERSON in this treasure trove of corruption. A lot of tinpots and former tinpots get a gong, alongside British Prime Minster Cameron, whose father may have benefited from secret payolas. 

So we can thus trust that ALL AMERICAN PEOPLE IN POWER are as white as a flock of geese. 

Meanwhile, Our Mr Murdoch, along with Tony Blair, George W Bush, John Howard and all their acolytes such as Rumsfeld, etc, should be in prison for life for having waged an illegal war on Iraq. This crazy act was more corrupt than shifting cash around the globe which our own PM, Turnbutt, does with official legal sanctioning in the Cayman Islands...

 

And did I see the "president of Ukraine" in this bad lot? Is he the one we (I mean the AMERICANS) actually give cash to, to entice "his" country TO BECOME "Westernised"? 

 

And the Arab world does not escape the reveal: Jordan, Syria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Egypt, Morroco....

It's time for Malcolm to tell us about his investments in the tax haven of the Cayman Island. How much of his money is involved in the merry-go-round of dark secret investments channels. We need to know IN DETAILS. Otherwise we cannot take his at his world. 

 

Meanwhile Graham Richardson, for the Australian, tells us that:

"Every time Malcolm Turnbull enters a room he believes he is the smartest person in it."

 

This is the headline in the TIME magazine online front page about the Panama Papers:

 

 

Massive Leak Ties Putin Associates to Offshore Money Trail

A massive leak of confidential documents purports to show how allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin may be tied to a $2 billion offshore money trail, with close friends and family members enjoying millions of dollars made in secret deals.

 

 

So where are the other 140 or so important people, including the Saudi King? I am starting to believe that these leaks were exclusively designed to get Putin... So far none of the Forbes many tax cheats have been listed by the media thought they would "in the documents". I suppose the papers might be worried they could get sued. They would think Putin would not.

 

I think Putin might be laughing for being named as part of an "elite" group...

 

 

You’d be forgiven for thinking, given the above picture, that the Panama Papers had something to do with Vladimir Putin. Maybe he was a kingpin of the whole thing. Maybe he was, at least, among the 12 world leaders implicated in various shady financial practices – along with Petro Poroshenko, the saviour of Ukrainian democracy, and the King of Saudi Arabia (dad of the recent Légion d’Honneur winner).

Luke Harding, a bastion of ethical journalism (and not at all a paranoid lunatic), has churned out 2 articles totaling over 5000 words, each using the word “Putin”, almost as often as they use the phrases “allegedly”, “speculation suggests”, “has been described as” and “may have been”.

Neither of his articles mentions by name any of the 12 world leaders, past and present, actually identified in the documents, nor do they mention David Cameron’s dad, who is also in there. No, they focus on a cellist friend of Putin’s, talk about his daughter’s marriage, and include an awful lot of diagrams with big arrows that point at pictures of…Vladimir Putin. This is, apparently, all evidence of…something.

http://off-guardian.org/2016/04/03/panama-papers-cause-guardian-to-collapse-into-self-parody/

 

Maybe Mossack Fonseca just isn't the favored servicer of American corporations and zillionaires. But surely they have some American customers? Yes indeed:

Editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung responded to the lack of U.S. individuals in the documents, saying "Just wait for what is coming next"

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) April 3, 2016

So stay tuned. Maybe Hillary Clinton has millions of dollars stashed away in the Isle of Man!

 

read more: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/04/panama-papers-offshore-tax-havens-are-getting-their-day-spotlight

Yes Gus, the Panama Papers are out & the Panama Papers propaganda is out as well.

So why does this new mega-leak seemingly only expose those in the US State Department crosshairs or expendable others & not a single prominent American politician or businessman?

No FOREX scandal in Israel (ongoing theft/fraud on massive scale), no non-Icelandic bankers or politicians (they sent many bankers to prison when no-one-else did), no American crime families (Clinton Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grandfatherly Buffet with his penchant for ice cream cones & Coke, The Bush Patriots nor Blankenfein’s, Diamon’s or Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan executives.

But Putin by implication & of course, Assad. Whose enemies are these? Nothing to do with massive finds of oil & natural gas in the Golan Heights (Syria) or Iranian relationship to Russia.

Nothing to see here other than long time held back “whistle-blowers” clearing their conscience: nothing more. Justice must be done for those who seek rent, I mean self-enriching.

And what does this have to do with the OECD’s plan for a global taxation grid?

 

John Doe of the famous Panama papers has been editorialising. I believe that despite having released 11 millions bits of papers on the way the rich and famous — especially Russians, Chinese and Arabs — have been using offshore accounts to "launder" cash behind the counter and away from the tax man, he is perplexed as to why nothing has happened, and the world is still spinning on its axis.
I don't know why, but I smell a rat's arse. 
Here we have grand larceny exposed about the rest of the world, but basically no-one from the USA. So John Doe, guided by the hands of a pure journalistic device in the hands of a few pure capitalists, has been miffed a tad that after his big reveal of a few weeks ago, it's business as usual. The rich get richer, the despots get more despotic and swindle more cash away to island havens. Please don't tell me that no-one in the USA is using hidden tax minimisation schemes and offshore accounts. So John Doe warns us:

But most of all, the legal profession has failed. Democratic governance depends upon responsible individuals throughout the entire system who understand and uphold the law, not who understand and exploit it. On average, lawyers have become so deeply corrupt that it is imperative for major changes in the profession to take place, far beyond the meek proposals already on the table. To start, the term “legal ethics,” upon which codes of conduct and licensure are nominally based, has become an oxymoron. Mossack Fonseca did not work in a vacuum—despite repeated fines and documented regulatory violations, it found allies and clients at major law firms in virtually every nation. If the industry’s shattered economics were not already evidence enough, there is now no denying that lawyers can no longer be permitted to regulate one another. It simply doesn’t work. Those able to pay the most can always find a lawyer to serve their ends, whether that lawyer is at Mossack Fonseca or another firm of which we remain unaware. What about the rest of society?

The collective impact of these failures has been a complete erosion of ethical standards, ultimately leading to a novel system we still call Capitalism, but which is tantamount to economic slavery. In this system—our system—the slaves are unaware both of their status and of their masters, who exist in a world apart where the intangible shackles are carefully hidden amongst reams of unreachable legalese. The horrific magnitude of detriment to the world should shock us all awake. But when it takes a whistleblower to sound the alarm, it is cause for even greater concern. It signals that democracy’s checks and balances have all failed, that the breakdown is systemic, and that severe instability could be just around the corner. So now is the time for real action, and that starts with asking questions.

Historians can easily recount how issues involving taxation and imbalances of power have led to revolutions in ages past. Then, military might was necessary to subjugate peoples, whereas now, curtailing information access is just as effective or more so, since the act is often invisible. Yet we live in a time of inexpensive, limitless digital storage and fast internet connections that transcend national boundaries. It doesn't take much to connect the dots: from start to finish, inception to global media distribution, the next revolution will be digitized.

Or perhaps it has already begun.

read more: http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/572c897a5632a39742ed34ef/

 

Great words indeed.

We know. It's a bit Christianised morality. This editorialisation is more or less what most of us (now the two old kooks in here) have been raving on for the last ten years without the moral religious bit, so what's new? The system has not moved an inch. The deontological ethics have not been served. And the Christian evangelicals are more hypocritical than ever as they loose ground on "ideology" which they have now to sell with double-ended burning candles to survive. Everyone is in it for a buck. Greed rules. That's the system. It cannot be cleaned up. The faster the social media grows, the more it becomes highjacked and corporatised. Here we see the facebooks and the googles dishing out the news with the same sauce that the murdochs ever did. They hide some of the reality and harp on what they want you to believe. What they want you to know ultimately is that the System rules and it's comfortable for you to slave in it. The Empire is working on "democratic" absorption that keeps the system alive. For example there is a weird article in the SMH about rich people selling stocks:

"Very, very high income people are disproportionately likely to sell a bunch of stock during a financial crisis," said Daniel Reck, a doctoral candidate in the economics department at the University of Michigan and one of the paper's authors. "It's difficult to say exactly how much high-income people are responsible relative to everyone else, but they're certainly contributing more to volatility."

Higher stakes, or better at timing trades?

One explanation for the divergence is that rich people have more at stake per person and are more sensitive to shocks, though it's only speculation, Reck said. Another is they believe they're better market timers. A third possibility is that investors who earn less are reluctant to sell at a loss, a cognitive tendency known as the disposition effect.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/super-rich-were-first-to-bail-whe...
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook


What is not mentioned here is "insider trading". What is really happening is "outsider trading with an inside knowledge". The rich people are the one who "created the parts of the system" so they know the inbuilt obsolescence in the portion of that game which cannot go on forever growing more value on shit. They are the one who invented the "pass the subprime parcel". At the start of the game, they know that the value in the package is not worth a fart but as they smell the foreclosure collapse starts to domino, they will sell "with a heavy heart". They will sell early, with various business reasons, from needing more cash to buy something else or to do a good deed by selling below cost, as per the recorded value in the books, which have already been highly profitable, since the package is worth nothing. 
Then they will advise the governments on how to solve the crisis they created, which is a way for them to cash-in directly on the rescue package the government is going to throw at the system to keep it going. Most of the rich will get the bigger slice of the cake while the poor might get a few crumbs, with the great news in the media that the system has been saved. We are all relieved.
The media is part of the sting, though most of the media scribes don't know why but they think the system is good and worth protecting.
Here, the most interesting bit is that Wikileaks did not bite on the Panama papers offer. I suppose two things: Wikileaks demands exclusivity and Wikileaks is savvy enough to suspect that the Panama papers "project" is part of a sting — a sting that has not worked too well so far. 
Who is stinging whom is not clear at this stage, except that so far "no American" has been implicated. Only the enemies of the Empire with a minimal amount of collateral damage to give it cred, like Cameron's dad and the PM of Iceland, have been implicated. So where to now? The Panama papers have somehow "died in the bum" news wise, so the John Doe is trying to editorialise with chivalresque altruism... 
The news are really old news that had been given a new lease of life with the release of "proof". Proof of what? That some people and companies use legal avenues to swindle cash away from our taxation systems? That lawyers are working the system? Yes the system is corrupted by the laws themselves — laws that are designed and influenced by those who can profit from them. Changing the ethics is not going to improve the result.
The only way out of here is to say good-bye to the capitalist system entirely, which is doing nothing good to the planet. This is why Bernie Sanders is going great guns but will go nowhere. Anyway he is not in favour of dismantling the whole system, only the few unpalatable bits, those that would give a bit more social kudos to the system. Thus the system would still survive with a few nose out of joint — and it would not be the nose of the rich. That, we know that much. Giving cred to this system would actually be perverse.
Trump or Hillary? They won't make a dent in the way things work. More people will get killed under different reasons or banner and the poor will stay poor with a different stylistic hope of getting richer — one day. Dream on, cobber. There is more chance of winning the lottery than getting rich as the rich, by working hard in this crooked system.
People will find new ways to rort the system as it is, anyway. A digital revolution? 
I hope I am wrong but it could not happen, with people pressing buttons in their little phones. Sounds more like a devious plot of Big Brother working for the matrix.

Gus Leonisky
your local money bag...

 

 

 

read from top...

 

From the Washington Post, a month ago...

Correction: This blog post incorrectly suggested that the Beaurepaire Park estate is owned by Yuri Luzhkov. In fact, the sole beneficial owner of the estate is Mr. Luzhkov’s wife, Elena Baturina, according to records provided by an attorney for the couple.

In the village of Bramley, Hampshire, an English country estate is undergoing a major renovation. A large crane can be seen from the road, along with wide lawns and the old trees of an elegant park. Beaurepaire Park was pointed out to me a few weeks ago by locals who told me the surprising name of their new neighbor: Yuri Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow.

Fascinated to learn that Luzhkov and his wife, Elena Baturina, Russia’s only female billionaire, had decided to experience English country life, I looked up the house in the British Land Registry. But although the purchase price was there – £5.5 million ($7.9 million) — I found no Russian names. The owner is Skymist Holdings Limited, which is also responsible for the extensive renovation. (Update: See correction above)

I thought of Beaurepaire Park this week, when British Prime Minister David Cameron was overheard telling the Queen that the leaders of two “fantastically corrupt” countries, Nigeria and Afghanistan, were coming to the anti-corruption summit he was holding in London. This “gaffe” was piously reported as somehow insulting, even though when asked, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari said Cameron was “telling the truth.” Buhari was too polite to make the obvious rejoinder: If we are going to start calling countries “fantastically corrupt,” then Britain, like the United States, belongs on that list, too.

Not that “corruption” in London takes exactly the same form as it does in Abuja or Kabul. Daily life in Britain does not require the payment of bribes; the court system is widely and justly admired. But over the past couple of decades, London’s accountants and lawyers have helped launder billions of dollars of stolen money through the British Virgin Islands, among other British overseas territories.  The British property market — like the New York property market — has long functioned like an old-fashioned Swiss bank, providing safe real estate investments for owners who wish their identities and their sources of income to be hidden. Several U.S. states — most famously Delaware, but also New Mexico, Nevada and Wyoming — make it possible for anonymous owners to register companies with few legal checks, too. Those companies can then go on to do business, or buy property, in places such as rural Hampshire.

Belatedly, things are beginning to change. The Panama Papers leak embarrassed Cameron personally because his late father was listed as having run — legally — an offshore investment fund. In London this week, he announced that Britain would henceforth require the “beneficial owners” of British property to reveal their names in a public register. Last January, U.S. authorities instituted a similar set of rules, starting in Manhattan and Florida’s Miami-Dade County.

But there is still a long way to go, in Reno, the Cayman Islands and Hampshire alike. At base, the problem remains one of perception: Because we don’t see the effects so easily in our own lives, it’s still far too easy to pretend that corruption in Moscow or Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, is something best explained by the moral weakness of Russians and Kazakhs, not our own. Because there are no “corpses on the street,” as one investigator put it, we treat it as “not our problem.”

Instead we pay the price in other ways. Think of the foreign policy time and foreign aid money we spend fighting poor governance and corruption in other countries. Think of the effort required to cope with the fallout when kleptocratic states — Afghanistan, for example — fail and fall apart, or when, like Russia, they become aggressive and threatening. The world would be safer and richer if we stopped laundering the money that helped create those kleptocracies in the first place. But like addicts or alcoholics, we’ll first need to admit that we have a problem before we can really begin to solve it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/05/13/how-the-u-s-and-britain-help-kleptocrats-around-the-world-and-how-we-pay-the-price-as-well/

 

Gus note: Russia has not threatened anyone. Russia is not "aggressive" either. Like most countries in the world, Russia seeks peace, because war would be too onerous. The Russians intervened efficiently in Syria to a) protect "their" only Mediterranean sea port, b) to stop the silly dreadful American policy of supporting Wahhabi extremists (terrorists) against a moderate but firm government c) to protect their gas market to Europe d) to provide balance in the Shia-Sunni "eternal" war.

Russia took Crimea (truly a Russian province) in a fair retribution to unlawful expansion of US "interests" in Ukraine. That NATO exercises near the Russian borders lead the Russians to embolden their own troops is "natural".

Unlike the US, Russia does not want war nor is Russia trying to "change" the world contrarily to the whims and fancies of warmongering US presidents spewing fake ideals of "democracy" that destroy cultures.

 

Gus note 2: Our own PM, Malcolm Turnbull uses the Cayman Islands to do tax minimisation in investments legally. He should be booted out.