The world's biggest "offshore" tax heaven is not any of the Caribbean islands. It's not Switzerland. It's not Hong Kong.<p>It's South Dakota. [1]<p>Former hedge fund manager and financial book author Patrick Boyle explains what these Pandora Papers mean in a video [2].<p>There are rumors and speculations that both the Panama and Pandora Papers leaks were released by the CIA. The leak is so massive and so many entities were hacked that only a nation state could have pulled it off. And given who was and who wasn't implicated in this and given which news orgs received these papers, it's pretty obvious that CIA or NSA or some other part of the US IC community was behind these leaks. And none of the media companies are asking the question of who is behind these leaks for a very good reason.<p>Just imagine if Wikileaks had released something like this... all these news orgs would immediately blame it on "russians" and claim it's all fake.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/heres-how-states-like-south-dakota-have-become-global-tax-havens.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/heres-how-states-like-south-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INRs9rnciyI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INRs9rnciyI</a>
> "the effect of the Pandora Papers is to, deservedly, trash a suite of non-US tax havens"<p>> "Who benefits? The US and the Big Four"<p>I'm a bit confused as I read this article as my understanding was that the Pandora Papers, for once, shed light on how the US is becoming the place of choice for the super rich seeking to escape taxation:<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/04/pandora-papers-reveal-south-dakotas-role-as-367bn-tax-haven" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/04/pandora-papers-...</a><p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/booming-us-tax-haven-industry/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/boo...</a><p>Not sure exactly how these revelations "benefit the US"?
I don't know what he's talking about when he says that only 1% of the ICIJ gets is made public. They published everything they had from previous leaks as far as I know. See here<p><a href="https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/" rel="nofollow">https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/</a><p>The current data leak is a bunch of unprocessed files and emails that would be irresponsible to leak as it could contain private information such as passport scans of no public utility. They said they are in the process of cleaning that data to later make it available.
Why would the Pandora Papers leaker give it to the institution that had a precedent for censoring leaks in the past? If any leakers are reading this, please consider seeding a torrent from a burner phone and posting magnet links to 4chan/reddit, let them do the sifting and seeding.<p>Much less work, and I guarantee that it'll be far more effective than whatever they've been doing so far.
Per the Washington Post [1]<p>> "The uber-rich in the United States tend to pay such low tax rates that they have less incentive to seek offshore havens. But their absence from the files also may mean that very wealthy Americans turn to different offshore jurisdictions."<p>[1] <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/pandora-papers-offshore-finance/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2021/pan...</a>
Subtext of the claim: US-funded hackers broke into offshore banking service providers to expose geopolitical enemies while protecting their own<p>Proof: none
The truth is: all these leaks didn't unearth as much dirt on high-profile politicians as the journalists hoped for. Also, the "Swiss bank accounts" seem to have become a Hollywoood clichée that do not have much practical relevance any more. The biggest problem we have regarding taxes is an overly complicated tax code with too many legal loopholes.<p>The Wall Street Journal has a sober review of the Pandora papers:
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/pandora-papers-flat-tax-reform-wealth-inequality-loophole-11633616530" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/articles/pandora-papers-flat-tax-reform-...</a>
For those curious on the source - Michael West is a former stockbroker turned financial journalist for major Australian newpapers, who started his own independent media company after being axed by them.
This video (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INRs9rnciyI0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INRs9rnciyI0</a> ) illuminates some of the biases that these leaks have this time around. I feel this sort of leak is more about attention grabbing media bites, than a thirst for real change. And i would guess that this leak potentially harms more people than it saves.
I am surprised that no one here has stated the obvious, that the release of information on big participants in the USA _could_ be released next. The summary page at the Guardian says "What has been revealed so far?" That implies that more may be revealed. If I was going to out the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world I'd take the time to get my facts straight and investigate all the legal angles.
Also since this is a distributed project some reporters may be taking longer to dig into their sub-projects.
> the upshot will be to drive global wealth towards secrecy jurisdictions in the US such as Rupert Murdoch’s preferred haven of Delaware.<p>Delaware as a secret tax haven? What?? How?
The question which always comes to mind when some "papers" are released allegedly revealing how bad our politicians and other leaders are...why are we all so much better off than our ancestors just a hundred years ago? Less war, less famines, more quality of life, more personal freedom, improving standards in the "3rd world", scientific breakthroughs, etc.?
Has anybody said anything about the source of these leaks? From what I understand they come from multiple (14?) off shore service providers. Were those all compromised by the same perpetrator? Quite a feat. How can we know the data wasn't filtered before reaching the ICIJ?<p>What about the legality of this? Every decent person seems to love these types of leaks while admitting there's nothing inherently illegal going on. Does that mean it's nothing more than "celebrity secrets exposed"? With elected officials you could make the case that they should be held accountable but what about people who never held or no longer hold office?<p>What argument justifies that all this dirty laundry should be exposed? Is it morally correct to hack my neighbor's email and expose the fact he didn't declare his taxes properly, or is there some kind of threshold that should be applied?
I wonder if it's possible to automate the offshoring of financial assets with the same structure that the Pandora+Panama papers lay out. Folks who aren't quite "wealthy" but still have wealth they'd like to shelter from regulating authorities would then be able to take advantage of the same loopholes. Perhaps then there would be incentive to close the loopholes.<p>On a more meta note I find that many HN posts (including this one) follows Betteridge's Law of Headlines (1) and is obviously clickbait. Why would this be upvoted? What relevance does this have to do with "[something] that good hackers would find interesting" (per HN guidelines)?<p>1: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines#:~:text=Betteridge's%20law%20of%20headlines%20is,the%20principle%20is%20much%20older" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...</a>.
Nothing is going to come off this. Nothing will change. That’s the world we live in: get rich then sell ways to grow it at all costs and hide it from the tax man