Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 452 posts

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

#321

Post by xg15 »

r3bl wrote: post #143
wyck wrote: post #21

Panama just passed compliance with FATF (February 2016) and it's a message that their political leader/law firm owner/world's largest money launderer (his name is in the OP's title) is no longer open for business after decades of being the go-to place for hidden $$$. http://www.fatf-gafi.org/countries/#Panama "The FATF recognised that Algeria, Angola and Panama have made significant progress in improving their regime…

> 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.

Indeed the website looks very good - and analyzing and presenting such a huge amount of data deserves respect.

But I was also wondering why this leak had to be embargoed for a year. Why not release the complete raw data very quickly (with irrelevant, privacy-sensitive areas visibly redacted) and follow up with a detailed analysis later?

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

#322

Post by xg15 »

r3bl wrote: post #240
wyck wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bare…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment, but if you have such an event ongoing and you manage to keep silence about it for over a year between ~300 people from half a dozen countries and 107 organisations - to such an extent that two hours before you have not more than ten tweets - then it looks to me that coordination works extremely well.

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

#323

Post by arethuza »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #87
sievebrain wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The leak is of historical documents dating back decades, not a snapshot of current setups. So I don't see why that'd affect anything. I really doubt this is some sort of official leak though. Governments hate leaks of all kinds.

>Governments hate leaks of all kinds. Not in the UK. Leaks and "off the record briefings" are practically official government policy. To me this looks like a rather stupid attempt to promote regime change in Russia. Putin was weakened by the low oil price, and now this has all the signs of a bizarre poli-sci undergraduate plot to push him over the edge. I'll change my mind if a list of significant British and US pols…

"official government policy"

That makes the government sound like single atomic entity - it is, of course, made up of politicians who spend a significant proportion of their time playing the game of politics.

Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, has described how Number 10 typically can't see the diaries of cabinet ministers as this would allow them to work out which minister was lunching with which journalist and therefore where particular leaks came from. Of course, Number 10 also briefs for and against individual ministers.

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

#324

Post by kofejnik »

aleksi wrote: post #303
harry8 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll bite. What do you think Vlad Putin's legit source is for his billions? His paycheck? Sometimes you don't have to know all the details. Somtimes the mere fact of a bank account with billions in it is enough to know, with certainty that a politician has his/her hand in the till and is a corrupt bastard. I pick on Vlad, there's plenty more to choose from. Now the evidence exists to remove doubt from the accusat…

Sorry for nitpicking, but: in Russian language Vlad is the short form for Vladislav, not Vladimir.

plenty of Vladimirs go by Vlad. Source: used to live in Russia

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

#325

Post by icebraining »

tdaltonc wrote: post #307
xbryanx wrote: post #15

Planet Money did a pretty enjoyable show about setting up shell companies, that might provide some interesting context for this news: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/27/157499893/episo... and http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/30/472452808/episo...

I wonder if they knew this was coming.

I doubt it, since the episodes are from 2012.

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

#326

Post by anonymousDan »

twoodfin wrote: post #259
cm3 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring fairness of certain taxes and issues with tax laws in general, taxes are the rent one has to pay for living in a place. If you don't have income you usually won't pay most taxes at all. It's arguable how much of the tax system works and what parts are just plain broken and favor certain interest groups, but that's an implementation detail. If you visit places where much of the population evades taxes, you'll…

The U.S. has a very strange corporate tax system. Why should Apple have to pay U.S. taxes on the profits they make selling in Germany a phone made of Korean components in a Chinese factory? That's above and beyond whatever taxes they're paying in the supplier nations and in Germany itself, which I assume are not insignificant.

As long as they pay taxes on that profit somewhere I don't care. At the moment they don't pay them anywhere, instead telling the Germans that the profits were made by the US part of the company and so can't be taxed there, and then using the US's daft repatriation laws to avoid paying US taxes by just leaving the profits offshore.

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

#327

Post by voidpointer »

ig1 wrote: post #234
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.

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 lo…

Is that really true? I am not a US citizen but I have an account with a US broker. I just need to file a single form once in a while declaring my foreign tax status and that's it. This can hardly be the reason why it is absolutely necessary to have offshore holdings.

(Of course, I have to pay taxes at home for any profits and there are supposed to be mechanisms that ensure I do...)

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

#328

Post by arethuza »

dangerlibrary wrote: post #299
the_watcher wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still reasons to use shell corporations that are entirely legitimate, and have no moral issues whatsoever.

Since you used the plural: care to name two?

To reduce amount of tax paid and to obfuscate ownership to reduce the amount of tax paid?

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

#329

Post by usaphp »

alkonaut wrote: post #320
usaphp wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The russian reserve funds are falling pretty rapidly Any data to back up that claim? Looking at the national reserve fund data it does not look to be anywhere near "falling pretty rapidly" [1] Also Russian national debt has decreased by quite a lot in recent years [2], and now is only about 25% of GDP, which is a very low figure compared to other countries. 1 - https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B5…

The fund shrunk by 20% in the last two years (from 2014 to 2016) due to the sanctions and low oil prices. I'd say 10% on a per-year basis is pretty fast. http://old.minfin.ru/en/nationalwealthfund/statistics/amount...

Why are you only cherry picking the data that fits your narrative? The link you included shows that since the time when Putin become a president in 2008 - reserve fund increased by more than 230% in USD and almost 10X in rubbles, the recent drop in reserve fund in USD is happening because of the oil prices decrease (same thing is happening with US national reserve [1]) , but even thought oil prices dropped by almost 400% in recent 2 years - the Russian reserve fund has only dropped by 20% in USD and it actually increased in rubbles. I am very far from Putin supporter, and I absolutely dislike what is happening in Russia, but I just don't like when people come up with "facts" by cherrypicking stuff, if you want to be objective - look at the combined data, do not ignore whatever does not fit your narrative.

1 - http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/foreign-exchan...

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

#330

Post by chmike »

cm2187 wrote: post #319

I am surprised given the audience oh HN that no one seems to consider the technical aspect of this leak. This is yet another failure to protect corporate data. It is obvious that this law firm worked with criminals, but I am sure they also had legitimate clients whose private information is now exposed. Of all the companies, a law firm contains secret that are protected by law (attorney-client privilege) and for very…

I wouldn't call it a bad leak. Something like Snowden leak.

I guess price of art artifacts will raise in the following years. No risk of leaks.

Post reply on HN