In early November, over thirteen million documents from the Bermuda-based law firm Appleby were released to the public. Known as the Paradise Papers, these documents detail a vast effort to shield the wealth of some of the world’s richest people from the tax authorities, as well as creditors and estranged family members. This follows the leak last year of the Panama Papers, a similar set of documents revealing how assets are hidden offshore.

The use of offshore tax havens is facilitated by wealth managers, who tend to the assets of the ultra-wealthy and ensure they can register their wealth in the optimal offshore locations. Brooke Harrington, a professor at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, spent nearly eight years studying wealth managers, interviewing dozens of them about their work.

In the following interview — which first appeared on Doug Henwood’s Behind the News and has been edited and condensed — Harrington explains who is taking advantage of these tax havens, and what the explosion in offshore accounts means for the global economy.