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Showing posts from April, 2016

Selling our enemies the rope to hang us

Panama is not the world's largest off shore financial centre. Mossack Fonseca is not the worlds largest offshore lawyer. The scale of the leak of confidential information is huge, but in fact it represents the tip of the iceberg for the flow of offshore money it represents. The British Overseas territories, especially Bermuda (for insurance), the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands (for trading funds) and the Channel Isles (for private equity and other fund structures) handle a much larger flow of funds. Panama is not the world's most trusted jurisdiction and as a result the level of criminal transactions could be a higher percentage there than in the UK controlled jurisdictions or Luxembourg or Malta. Nevertheless the fact is that the funds flows detailed in the stolen data are still a relatively small amount of global offshore transactions. The press in the democratic world is predictably outraged, and, equally predictably, is focusing on the wrong target. Sin