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Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

bbc.com

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Re: Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

#231

Post by prawn »

ryanlol wrote: post #191
IkmoIkmo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd replace wrongdoing with illegal. If you ask me, if you're a billionaire and you're not willing to pay taxes and spend 0.0001% of your wealth on the expertise to reduce your tax bill by 99%, in legal ways that 99.99% of the rest of the population doesn't engage in, then by all means that's wrongdoing to me and I think most would be with me on that. Of course it's not necessarily illegal.

What about non billionaires? These arrangements aren't overly expensive and are very much suitable for perfectly "ordinary" people.

That's what shits me. If it's smart, viable strategy, why not make it available by default for every citizen with a basic tax framework instead of something only available to the wealth to push further ahead?

Re: Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

#232

Post by cm3 »

snitko wrote: post #210
cm3 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation bodies: Of course regulators need oversight and regulation and it's hard to get right. Total transparency is the first step in everything. No penny can cross a table visibly without being accounted for. But it's easy to involve malevolent parties in oversight, looking for their own outcome rather than find a universally beneficial regulation. Hard nut to crack. Election: Probably getting rid of all the fin…

From reading your post I feel like there's this thinking that's ingrained very deep in you, which is that no matter how corrupt or awful the system is, you think the solution is more government and more control... layers of control. Could you for a moment just forget about it all and think, really imagine, what a world would look without governments? But don't imagine chaotic endless tribal wars. Imagine it to be a g…

I like to think I don't have political views, just observing faults of existing structures and finding bug fixes. I'm neither left or right or peachpie. Maybe you would call me a realist and I'm sure there's a way to put me in a box for that view, though it's important to stress that I don't subscribe to any particular political system. Humans are just too hard to manage that none of those black/white ideologies work.

Having zero governing bodies is a thought experiment laid out more than a few times in Sci-Fi, so assuming those weren't totally wrong, I don't think the human race can do without. The problem are humans and their motivations. Greed is one problem, laziness another. I don't know how to solve those. How do you make sure people do not exploit their freedom by making others suffer?

Okay, let's say there's no governing body. Now, there's a dispute. How is it resolved? Fight to death? The achievement of modern society is that we do not kill each other, and that requires rule makers, rule enforcers, oversight to keep chaos down to a minimum. If we do, it's a punishable offense. But punishment as implemented right now is totally wrong and doesn't solve anything. Putting people away for years does not make the crime undone and also doesn't turn a killer into a pet store owner. There are experiments with different kinds of containment and reintegration into society but this is also a hard problem that's unsolved.

I honestly don't know how without some sort of management entity a peer to peer society would work without rules of any kind.

Once you enact rules of conduct, you have everyone follow the rules, and something somewhere needs to make sure rules are not broken unjustifiably.

It's like distributed systems or cooperative threading, if you think about it.

Can you tell me how you'd do it?

Re: Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

#233

Post by mindcrime »

krapp wrote: post #229
mindcrime wrote: post #220

We could solve this "problem" by simply eliminating taxation, and moving to a stateless society[1] and an across the board model of self-government[2]. [1]: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Order_without_the_sta... [2]: https://www.theadvocates.org/

Of course, there is the minor issue of "simply" convincing everyone to embrace anarchy, or "simply" disposing of everyone who doesn't.

simple != easy

I didn't say it would be easy. But we ought to at least have a target to aim for, yes?

Re: Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

#234

Post by ig1 »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #181
UVB-76 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, being featured in these documents is not in and of itself evidence of any wrongdoing. There are entirely lawful and legitimate reasons for making use of offshore company structures.

I'd replace wrongdoing with illegal. If you ask me, if you're a billionaire and you're not willing to pay taxes and spend 0.0001% of your wealth on the expertise to reduce your tax bill by 99%, in legal ways that 99.99% of the rest of the population doesn't engage in, then by all means that's wrongdoing to me and I think most would be with me on that. Of course it's not necessarily illegal.

I think what OP meant is that there are reasons for companies to be off-shore which are totally above board.

A common reason that investment funds are in off-shore tax-havens is because they have lots of international investors. If the fund was say in the US all the investors would have to file tax documents in the US even if they weren't US based, by being based in a tax haven it means investors only have to file local tax paperwork and not paperwork in a second country.

Re: Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

#235

Post by [deleted] »

infodroid wrote: post #200
cperciva wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so remarkable about focusing on heads of state rather than lesser ministers, members of parliament, etc.?

It makes me wonder why an "associate" of a foreign head of state is a more relevant story than the father of the head of state, or of serving politicians with close links to the party of the head of state, from the same country's taxpayer-funded news service. The story doesn't even mention the implication of Cameron's father in the scheme. Which is odd, because Cameron stood to gain from the inheritance. And if the a…

[deleted]

Re: Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

#236

Post by BenoitP »

jonesb6 wrote: post #142

Apparently there are no American politicians or businessmen listed. And no coverage on NYTimes, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, USAtoday, LA Times, etc. That seems strange to me.

Coverage will come, the leaks started later in the day in the US.

As for no American politicians or businessmen, it can be explained by sample size:

The USA might have their own internal money dirty money path. Or maybe the tax haven of choice is another country for the US. Maybe the IRS has specific rules for Panama?

That this one company has skew/bias in the origin of its clients does not surprise me at all.

If we had variety of leaks from different money fixers from different countries; say from the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Singapore, UAE, Monaco, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Belize; and no US scandal, I would be very surprised.

Re: Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

#237

Post by viraptor »

defen wrote: post #179

Any US presidential candidates implicated? Particularly Trump or Clinton? Or is this primarily used by non-US money launderers / tax-evaders?

Random thought: most of the candidates are in the documents - journalists are still trying to figure out how to deal with that. There's more information to come...

Re: Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

#238

Post by krapp »

mindcrime wrote: post #233
krapp wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, there is the minor issue of "simply" convincing everyone to embrace anarchy, or "simply" disposing of everyone who doesn't.

simple != easy I didn't say it would be easy. But we ought to at least have a target to aim for, yes?

It's a target the vast majority of people in the world don't want to aim for. But I guess it is a target. Like a lot of utopian ideals, anarchy only works as long as everyone agrees to be an anarchist. Unfortunately for anarchists, people find states, laws and the monopoly on violence to be useful.

Re: Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

#239

Post by snitko »

cm3 wrote: post #232
snitko wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From reading your post I feel like there's this thinking that's ingrained very deep in you, which is that no matter how corrupt or awful the system is, you think the solution is more government and more control... layers of control. Could you for a moment just forget about it all and think, really imagine, what a world would look without governments? But don't imagine chaotic endless tribal wars. Imagine it to be a g…

I like to think I don't have political views, just observing faults of existing structures and finding bug fixes. I'm neither left or right or peachpie. Maybe you would call me a realist and I'm sure there's a way to put me in a box for that view, though it's important to stress that I don't subscribe to any particular political system. Humans are just too hard to manage that none of those black/white ideologies work…

> Okay, let's say there's no governing body. Now, there's a dispute. How is it resolved? Fight to death?

You've got an excellent question and I've got an excellent answer for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o It's a short video, but I highly recommend it to you (skip the first minute or so for a short historical intro). Please come back here and let me know if it answered your question. I also hope it doesn't just answer your question, but sets in your in a different mode for thinking, mode in which problems that seemed unsolvable can now be solved.

Re: Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens

#240

Post by r3bl »

wyck wrote: post #219
r3bl wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Real leaks don't have fancy websites with responsive vectorized portraits and a full on content /social media structure. Yes they do and you're welcome. Sincerely, somebody who worked on this for way too long and practically hasn't left the office this entire weekend.

I'm not critiquing the website, it looks great to be honest. It's comes across a little odd when you target just a small amount of people, it almost seems like a sales pitch. The journalists need to be more transparent about the data and why these individuals were picked first, and how the data release is going to work. I hope for your sake you don't have to vectorize everyone mentioned in the data.

Worth pointing out: this is, in no way, done by a single media organization. This is a collaborative effort of ~107 news organizations from all over the world, and you can be sure that behind each of them there's a small dedicated tech team that worked tirelessly on making this thing look pretty.

Because this is such a huge collaborative effort involving over 300 journalists from god knows how many countries, we barely managed to set an embargo until 8 PM (CEST). An hour before that, there were literally less than 10 tweets using #panamapapers. Now, there's over half a million. And it's been just seven hours since I have started the tweet wall in our office!

From this point on, I believe that every media organization is going to focus on its own region, although I cannot guarantee that. After all, my job was to make the website look pretty. I had the honor of reading some of the stories before anyone else while I was preparing them for the website (and I will have the same honor again in ~5-6 hours), but that's about it.

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