Let Them Eat Profit

Governments have turned a blind eye to tax havens in order to protect corporate profitability.

Lynne Hand / Flickr


The leak of the so-called Panama Papers has certainly set the cat of popular disgust among the pigeons of the super-wealthy global elite. But, of course, pigeons can fly away.

The Panama Papers contain 11.5 million confidential documents that provide detailed information about more than 214,000 offshore companies listed by the Panamanian corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, including the identities of shareholders and directors of the companies.

An anonymous source using the pseudonym “John Doe” made the documents available in batches to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung beginning in early 2015. The information documents transactions as far back as the 1970s and eventually totaled 2.6 terabytes of data.

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