The Pandora Papers Have Exposed the Corrupt System that Lets the Rich Worldwide Avoid Paying Taxes
The Pandora Papers — 12 million files on the global 1 percent and the legal tricks they use to get out of paying taxes — are one of the biggest journalistic bombshells in years. They expose a system with one set of standards for the rich and another for everyone else.
The Pandora Papers expose a vast cache of private financial records that reveal the business of wealth concealment and tax avoidance by a global super-wealthy elite. (Loic Venance / AFP via Getty Images)
Last weekend, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published the Pandora Papers, an astonishingly vast cache of private financial records that exposes the globe-spanning business of wealth concealment and tax avoidance by the superrich. Consisting of nearly 12 million files and naming some fourteen world leaders, the leaks are just the latest in a growing mountain of empirical evidence for what many already know: an increasingly transnational class of elites now operates on the basis of its own rules, leveraging a complex and labyrinthine network of tax havens and jurisdictional loopholes to hide and protect its wealth.
Chuck Collins is the program director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of the 2021 book The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions. In the wake of the Pandora Papers’ release, Jacobin’s Luke Savage spoke to Collins about the leaks, what they reveal about the landscape of global wealth concealment and tax avoidance, and whether any mechanisms currently exist for reigning in the wealth of the global elite.
Luke Savage
To set the stage a little bit, can you give us some background on the Pandora Papers? What exactly has emerged through these leaks, and how do they compare to their most recent equivalent — the Panama Papers — in terms of their findings and scale?
Chuck Collins
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