The list of participants in the ICIJ is staggering in the omission of the most powerful media organisations in the world. Uncle Rupe's News Corp. is not directly privy to the "news" contained in the Panama Papers. I don't think he cares. Nor was he privy to the "Big Oil Bribe Factory" that came out of the Fairfax/Huff post stable. He's got his own agenda. He has his own disinformation channels (often directly from the US presidents themselves). All he needs is someone else to rock the boat and his right-wing commentators will do the most damage. Keeps his hands clean.

Now a few facts need to be set out: here we need to remember how our own John Howard got involved in the "Firepower" con-trick, through Austrade, Julie Bishop and Howard himself. Water on the duck's back. Same with our Turnbull and his Russian Rain inducing scheme... Both crazy schemes that simple investigation could see to be crooked, but the ministers were either guilible or crooked. Not a good indication of intelligence. And I did not mention "Saddam's Weapons of Mass Distraction" for Howard to wage an illegal war along with his mates. I think he still is working hard at deluding himself about this one...

 

Here we must mention Arianna Huffington. She is now on the board of the Center for Public Integrity... Not long ago she was taken to court:

 

"... her website and AOL were on the receiving end of a $105m (£64.5m) lawsuit by a group of angry bloggers unhappy that she sold the Huffington Post for $315m without them being paid a penny.

The class action is led by Jonathan Tasini, a writer and trade unionist, who wrote more than 250 posts for Huffington Post on an unpaid basis until he dropped out shortly after the news and comment site was sold to AOL earlier this year.

Tasini complained that "Huffington bloggers have essentially been turned into modern day slaves on Arianna Huffington's plantation" and said he was bringing the action because "people who create content ... have to be compensated" for their efforts.

 

One must say that Arianna has been floating between the right wing Republicans — for which her bisexual husband failed an attempt at congress — and the liberal values encompassing climate change. 
It is difficult to know where loyaty lie in this day and age. But "contrary to the OffGuardian, we've been promised more data about the yankees who cheat on their tax returns by using offshore havens. The Süddeutsche Zeitung said so... 
And by the way, Goldman Sachs got fined US$5 billion for having deliberately sold substandard crappy products. No one went to prison either.

 

Like the Guardian and its rubbish, our ABC plasters Vladimir Putin in the list of "corrupts because one of his associate "may be" wealthy through an offshore empire...:

 

 

The leak uncovered a suspected money laundering ring involving close associates of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

A close friend of Mr Putin's was put at the top of the offshore empire worth more than $2 billion which has made his circle extremely wealthy.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the reports were aimed at discrediting the Russian President.

He also claimed the journalists involved were "former officials from the (US) Department of State, the CIA and other special services". [Dmitry could be right about the source of the Panama Papers to the German newspaper — re the timing and the slant pushed by most newspapers. Mr John Doe is likely to be a few officials from the (US) Department of State, the CIA and other special services, undercover spreading believable shit alla double-cross. We shall see when the papers embarrass a few top yankees.]

"Putin, Russia, our country, our stability and the upcoming elections are the main target, specifically to destabilise the situation," Mr Peskov said.

 

 

HONG KONG — At least three of the seven people on the Chinese Communist Party’s most powerful committee, including President Xi Jinping, have relatives who have controlled secretive offshore companies, the organization that has publicized a trove of leaked documents about hidden wealth reported on Wednesday.

The disclosures by the organization, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, risked new embarrassment for the Chinese authorities, already unnerved and infuriated by the organization’s leaks of the documents, known as the Panama Papers.

Chinese government censors have moved aggressively since the first release of leaked documents on Sunday to purge any media’s mention of them in China, going so far as to block Internet searches and online discussions that involve the words “Panama Papers.”

 

 

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/world/asia/china-panama-papers.html?_r=0

 

 

As suggested by the article at top, so far only the so-called "recalcitrant" regimes have been "exposed", including China, Russia, Iceland (went broke for buying a lot of crooked American stocks before the GFC), the UK (threatening Brexit which the US does not want, because it wants a "five-eyes" member in the EU)), Arabic Tinpot Kingdoms and a few African leaders. A few Aussies are also in the collateral damage exposure to make it "believably" untargeted to Russia and China... The whose saga started with the exposure of Unaoil payola. 

 

Makes the union thugs look like choir boys... But our Turdbutt is not going to have RC into our banking institutions for doing things they should not have. And I trust his own cash is safe under a couple of palm trees in the Cayman Islands, away from possible investments into high risk Australian innovations...

 

Kick him in the nuts at the next election. He deserves more but that would be a good start.

 

The Yanks are so clean... in this “limited hangout”

 

From the OffGuardian...

What is significant here is that these scandals all involved Anglo-American financial/banking interests. It is a matter of record that the international financial system is dominated by Anglo-American banks and financial firms, based in London and New York. And corruption and malpractice is endemic in this business. In fact, a number of US investment banks have decamped to London since the light touch regulation in the UK allowed them to do things that they couldn’t get away with on the other side of the pond. Not for nothing was the City of London referred to as the US’s financial Guantanamo.

Moreover a recent publication Gomorrah, by Roberto Saviano, an internationally acclaimed crime expert, cites the City of London as the money-laundering centre of the world’s drug trade, according to him UK banks and financial services have ignored so-called “know your customer” rules designed to curb criminals’ abilities to launder the proceeds of crime, warned Mr Saviano, author of the international bestseller which exposed the workings of the Neapolitan crime organisation Camorra, said: “The British treat it as not their problem because there aren’t corpses on the street.” (The Independent, July 2015)

All par for the course in elite financial circles. But according to the Graun:

The temptation to conclude that all those names found in the papers are equivalent and rotten to the core is strong. But it is a temptation to resist: every case must be carefully judged on the specifics. David Cameron, whose father’s Blairmore investment fund is shown to have got up to all sorts of offshore antics to avoid ever paying UK tax, is not Vladimir Putin, whose cronies are documented to have amassed vast fortunes through financial engineering backed by apparent state fiat. The evidence for corruption at the Kremlin looks devastating, whereas Mr Cameron can fairly protest that the son is not responsible for the deeds of the father, especially not as he has taken some steps – such as banning the “bearer shares” that Cameron Sr’s fund long ago used – to protect the public interest.

So you see that Anglo-American finance capital which is scandal-ridden and rotten to the core, is not nearly as bad as Putin – who physiognomy is plastered over all the Guran’s front pages – maximising the demon-image. But note it was not Putin but his cronies who amassed fortunes. But the smear is enough.

My experience of eastern Europe, which has included the former Yugoslavia, East Germany, Russia (Soviet Union) Ukraine (Soviet Union and Independent 1991) led me to the conclusion that corruption is pretty well endemic in these states and societies. The outstanding instance of this took place under the rule of Boris Yeltsin and his oligarch backers, including one Boris Berezovsky – Godfather of the Kremlin – during the 1990s when the rule of law broke down.

Interestingly enough when Berezovsky fell out of favour he was granted political asylum in the UK; this in spite of his nefarious criminal activities which ‘probably’ included the murder of Paul Klebnikov, an American journalist of Russian extraction who wrote a withering critique of Mr B in his book, published in 2000,Godfather of the Kremlin. Never let it be said that Russian Mafia Dons would not get a warm welcome in the UK. This aside, it would be interesting to know by what criteria does the Graun judge Putin and his cronies to be worse than ours?

But of course this is all beside the point. What the Graun is patently trying to do is to milk this global scandal for every ounce of anti-Putin value they can extract. It is all part of the hybrid war which is going on between the west/NATO and Russia. The western media has been mobilised as part of this offensive, spewing out disinformation, propaganda and outright lies. Putin, along with those impertinent little upstarts like Assad who don’t do what they are told, are to blame for everything bad in the world. Why? Because we say so. The neo-con playbook is apparently also the Graun’s playbook.

unny how all this has come out just after the success of the Syrian army’s success in its campaign against the jihadists. Would the Graun be that cynical – you bet they would.

read more: http://off-guardian.org/2016/04/05/holier-than-thou-the-guardian-view-on-the-panama-papers/

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And Gus would agree...

 

Tax havens are an ideal environment for organised crime to launder the piles of cash they accrue. There is evidence the Italian mafia have used tax havens and invested their dirty money in the legal economy for decades.

When the Berlin Wall came down, Italian prosecutors intercepted a phone conversation. A mafia boss in Italy told his counterpart in Germany to travel east.

Go to East Berlin.

Why? What should I do?

You must buy everything, everything, everything. Buy discos, bars, pizzerias. Everything, everything, everything.

Italy is home to five declared mafia groups. They have invested money made from illegal activities, such as drug trafficking, sex slavery, kidnapping, blackmail and extortion, for decades. It's a strategy they still use, as well as techniques revealed in the Panama Papers. While Europe and countries around the world face economic challenges, it can be hard for some to say no to cold, hard cash.

David Ellero is the senior specialist in the Top Organised Crime Group Team at Europol:

"In a society that struggles to get assets, somebody who comes with a bag full of money is seen as a saviour. The problem is once these people get their foot in the door, it's impossible to get them out," he said.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-07/agius-panama-papers-and-the-mafia/7307092

 

Following the recent revelation that Billionaire financier George Soros (among others) stands behind the release of the “Panama Papers,” it behooves us to remember what else Soros has funded over the years.

Recently it became clear that Soros was sponsoring disruptions at Donald Trump speeches in the US. But most of Soros’ money and time goes to trying to engineer “regime change” abroad – particularly in Eastern Europe. What a generous fellow.

http://off-guardian.org/2016/04/07/video-what-has-george-soros-funded-over-the-years/

An IT worker at the Geneva offices of Mossack Fonseca, the offshore law firm at the centre of the Panama Papers scandal, has been arrested in the hunt for the whistleblower behind the biggest ever leak to journalists.

Early last year, an individual using the alias John Doe approached the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, offering data from the internal files of Mossack Fonseca. The leak led to the resignation of the Icelandic prime minister in April this year and sparked international protests over the use of tax havens by financial and political elites.

“A procedure has been opened by the public ministry of Geneva following a complaint made by Mossack Fonseca,” a spokeswoman for the city prosecutor confirmed on Wednesday afternoon. She said further information would follow in due course. The person arrested has not been named.

Uncertainty surrounds the reasons for the arrest. Süddeutsche Zeitung believes that the person arrested is not the newspaper’s source. Bastian Obermayer, who jointly led the investigation at the German paper, told the Guardian: “According to our information this is not John Doe”.

read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/15/mossack-fonseca-worker-arrested-switzerland-panama-papers

 

Matthew Caruana Galizia, a member of the international consortium of journalists responsible for peeling Mossack-Fonseca documents, was censured by Facebook. The journalist has involved several personalities from the Maltese state summit.

Accused of having favored the election of Donald Trump, Facebook had promised to intervene in the political content published by its users, within the framework of the supposed fight against the fake news and the viral articles, revising its algorithms of SEO. But the social networking giant is now going farther, relying on its draconian rules of use, at the risk of censoring "real news".

A member of the international consortium of journalists investigating the Panama Papers saw his Facebook account blocked. Matthew Caruana Galizia, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize by his peers, allegedly violated the rules of use of the social network by posting excerpts from documents that had leaked and called into question the Prime Minister of Malta, Joseph Muscat. The latter had already declared on May 10th his intention to prosecute the journalist, as reported by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

read more:

https://francais.rt.com/international/38609-panama-papers-facebook-bloqu...

Fresh evidence of links between the highest levels of Donald Trump’s administration and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin have been revealed in a massive leak of documents from firms and corporate registries specialising in tax minimisation and financial secrecy.

US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is among scores of high-profile names to emerge in an unprecedented dump of documents out of global offshore law firm Appleby, Singapore-based Asiaciti Trust and 19 corporate registries in notorious tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, dubbed the Paradise Papers. 

The ABC’s Four Corners program had access to more than 13.4 million documents leaked to German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, and shared through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with 96 media partners in 67 countries, in an even bigger leak than the Panama Papers in early 2016.

Mr Ross is a powerful figure within the Trump administration, handpicked and described by the President as “a killer” for his tough approach to business.

The documents reveal that Mr Ross continues to hold a stake in a shipping company that has a multi-million-dollar deal with a Russian firm part-owned by Putin cronies currently subject to US sanctions.

 

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-06/leaked-documents-link-trumps-comme...

 

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Who is THE “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”?(see toon and story at top). It’s a unit of the Soros Empire (which by the way has also financed GetUp!), who through his media empire is trying to change the face of the world, by supporting the Nazis in Ukraine and other little gems, like the Muslim-fication of Europe. But the main thing is that Soros hates the Russians worse than hell. The list of 67 countries with 96 media partners shows the extend to which the Soros empire has infected the planet. Uncle Rupe would be jealous...

 

And big deal: Mr Ross continues to hold a stake in a shipping company that has a multi-million-dollar deal with a Russian firm part-owned by Putin cronies currently subject to US sanctions. Remember the sale of the uranium consortium to the Russian government approved by Hillary Clinton. Business is business. US Sanctions ARE ONLY A DUBIOUS UNFAIR WAY TO PREVENT RUSSIA FROM DOING ANY BUSINESS with “western countries”. The US are actually afraid of the competition from Russia and from Europe. Any political decision will do to slant the playing field of commerce in the US favour. 

Ah yes, Russia has helped Assad, the man “who kills his own people and beautiful babies”, stay in power in Syria contrary to wishes of the US who wanted to overthrow him (contrarily to the United Nations charter) to allow the Saudis, the US "complicated" (Obama choice of words) friends (of which a mega-purge has seen Princes, ministers and ex-ministers charged with corruption) to “control” Syria by the US FINANCING a soft slow revolution led by “moderate” rebels allied with Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, all of which turned into IS... When the US and its western allies, including AUSTRALIA, kill people (including Syrian troops) in Syria (what the hell are we doing there?), it is always deemed to be accidental. The "proofs" that Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people are so flimsy that no proper investigation has been done.

Who are Putin “cronies” currently subject to US sanctions?  They are mostly people who are doing business in Europe trying to establish a new pipeline of gas for the Russians to sell more gas to Europe (by bypassing Ukraine which has turned into a US "rogue") — or sell Russian goods to the rest of the world. They are no more cronies of Putin than McDonald's and Hollywood are cronies to the presidency of the US. (Actually, Hollywood and McDonald's would be used by the US as infective prongs to launch US interests in other countries). The sanctions have been imposed on Russia by the US (reluctantly followed by Europe) because of “Crimea”. Crimea was a russian enclave in Ukraine (by default of a 1960s USSR gifting) that voted — like Scotland a few years ago (before Brexit) and Catalonia recently on the subject of independence... Crimea voted to become Russian again. This is pissing off the “free world”. The “free” Kosovo 1990-war was designed by the Clinton administration to weaken the Russian link to Yougoslavia which was dismantled. But nowadays, Catalonia “is not allowed to become independent” because... (insert a raft of US control interest). Had Scotland voted to become independent, the shit would have hit the fan. 

Our hypocrisy is now so deep inside our brain that we feel so righteous in whatever crap we are thinking. Our brainwashing by US double-dealing is complete. 13.4 million documents and not one US firms has been named in tax evasion? Ah yes...: INXS... and The Queen's private estate is shown to have invested in Cayman Islands and Guernsey-based funds, including one that invested in a UK consumer lending company that was ordered to repay millions of pounds to customers for breaching responsible lending standards.

A Royal spokesman said Her Majesty was unaware of the investment, and the Queen pays tax on a voluntary basis, so it appears there is no tax minimisation motive.

One has to know that, as the new US nation was fighting the British, the first US flag had the union jack in the corner while showing the 13 red and black bands as it is today... The Union Jack was eventually replaced with a blue patch and white stars...

 

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