U.S. financial whistle-blower Bradley Birkenfeld, who revealed massive tax evasion by U.S. firms and citizens while working at UBS bank in Switzerland, says he is "sure" the CIA is behind the Mossack Fonseca leak.
Birkenfeld pointed to the fact that the political uproar created by the disclosures have mainly impacted countries with tense relationships with the United States. "The very fact that we see all these names surface that are the direct quote-unquote enemies of the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, Argentina and we don't see one U.S. name. Why is that?" Birkenfeld said. "Quite frankly, my feeling is that this is certainly an intelligence agency operation."
As for Birkenfeld himself, his story is worth recounting a bit:
Birkenfeld, an American citizen, was a banker working at UBS in Switzerland when he approached the U.S. government with information on massive amounts of tax evasion by Americans with secret accounts in Switzerland. By the end of his whistleblowing career, Birkenfeld had served more than two years in a U.S. federal prison, been awarded $104 million by the IRS for his information and shattered the foundations of more than a century of Swiss banking secrecy.
Tax officials from 28 countries will gather in Paris on April 13 to discuss what to do in the face of the Panama Papers revelations and to discuss "a global approach" to tax information.
Senior officials from tax authorities around the world have said they intend to work together to analyse information revealed by the documents, which have provoked international concern over the offshore industry.
Investigations have been launched in a number of countries over the past week, but the Paris meeting will be an attempt to develop a global strategy to crack down on offenders.
The sheer scale of the leak – 11.5m documents, covering 210,000 companies in 21 offshore jurisdictions – has led to Wednesday’s hastily arranged meeting.
The aggressive new approach is being led by the Joint International Tax Shelter Information and Collaboration (Jitsic) network, of which the UK is a leading member.
Famed U.S. journalist Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, has been speaking out a bit on the Panama Papers, which he says is a triumph of journalism. Here is his interview with the BBC.
And here is an interview with Slate.
I think the Panama Papers are a great story, and I think it’s astonishing they kept it secret for so long. There are so many dimensions to it. They’re still working on it. Last week I did an interview with the BBC. Radio interview. Also on the show was the guy who heads the journalism collective in Washington that’s done this.
We were going through and the BBC interviewer was saying to him, “So, what new revelations do you have? What’s new? Give us something hot,” and he kept driving at this. I finally said to the interviewer, “You know, here you are. It’s the BBC, this distinguished broadcast operation, and you’ve got internet-itis. You want to know what’s the latest, what’s next, and here’s somebody’s group of people who have done some of the most serious journalism of the era, and they’ve explained, ‘We’re not going to be able to tell you everything, we’ve got to draw the connections, these are, what, 11 million pages?’ ” Have you ever read 11 million pages of anything?
Russia's controversial nationalist culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky says there is nothing in the Panama Papers that would "destroy Russia." Medinsky made the comments while in London to promote the U.K.-Russia Year of Language and Literature.
Medinsky said: "I believe that they [the Panama Papers] have discredited the UK, Iceland and Ukraine in more ways than Russia. I haven't read anything that would destroy Russia. As for me, personally I found nothing new in this investigation," he said.
The Panama Papers allege Roldugin was earning £6.5m a year, had £19m in cash from a stake in the advertising agency Video International, and a separate investment worth £100m. The cellist denies any wrongdoing and told Russian TV the money came from donations to purchase expensive musical instruments for young Russians.
Medinsky said: "I think that the Russians have had enough of it, because there is a lot of talk of trillions of dollars but all they found was a cellist. He is a man who dedicated his whole life to art and he is definitely the most famous cellist in the world now.
"Such an excess of attention drawn to him puts him in an awkward position. It (offshore trusts) are not a problem of Russia, it is a problem of all countries, who have offshore territories. I have seen none in [the far eastern Russian island territory] Kamchatka."
The secrets of the Panama Papers were once guarded only by a thin layer of "glitter nail polish (color unknown)."
The government in Malta is expected to face a no-confidence vote as pressure mounts against it over revelations in the Panama Papers. The latest revelations cast doubt on the explanations of the government officials named in the documents.
Mr Schembri earlier this week lashed out at reports by the Financial Review, which he said were "absolutely baseless".
He said his Panama company, Tillgate Inc was "intended solely for estate planning".
Mr Mizzi said in a public statement last week that his New Zealand trust was set up for family reasons, and that he had told the prime minister of his intention to have a bank account to receive rent payments on his London property.
The Mossack Fonseca documents show a more diverse investment strategy.
New European Union rules on tax transparency will hit some major multinational companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
"While our proposal on [country-by-country reporting] is not of course focused principally on the response to the Panama Papers, there is an important connection between our continuing work on tax transparency and tax havens that we are building into the proposal.”
How international aid flows into Africa and illegal capital flows out:
Russian investigative journalist Yulia Latynina has been thinking about the Panama Papers and the revelations about President Vladimir Putin's cellist friend, Sergei Roldugin. She notices that the transfer of funds to Roldugin came from Dagestani billionaire Suleiman Kerimov. The Jamestown Foundation has this English account of Latynina's reporting.
Roldugin has been a long-time friend of Putin. And Kerimov only transferred money to Roldugin during the period when he was politically in need. Not before. Not after. So how does a transfer of money to Roldugin buy Kerimov a favor in a time of need? Latynina notes that the relationship between power and money in Russia is at once inseparable and indirect. Therefore, she speculates, no one should believe that the $2 billion that Roldugin is in control of is entirely at his disposal. Of course, being close to Putin has financial benefits. But this money, naturally, is a supply of funds that would be available to Putin should he wish to access it.