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National Affairs

What are Panama Papers and Pandora Papers?

08 Aug 2023 Zinkpot 397
What are Panama Papers and Pandora Papers?
  1. The Panama Papers refer to the 11.5 million leaked encrypted confidential documents that were the property of Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca.
  2. Mossack Fonseca is a law firm headquartered in tax haven Panama, known for its factory-like production of offshore companies for its worldwide clientele of well-heeled.
  3. The documents were released on April 3, 2016, by German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung, dubbing them, the ‘Panama Papers’.
  4. The document exposed the network of more than 214,000 tax havens, involving people and entities from 200 different nations.
  5. Those named in the leak were a dozen of current or former world leaders, 128 public officials, politicians, hundreds of celebrities, business people, and other wealthy individuals.
  6. While most of the documents leaked did not show signs of criminal activity, many shell corporations mentioned had been a front for fraud, tax evasion, and avoiding sanctions. 
  7. It still led to some arrests in Germany and has benefitted investigations in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Iceland, and other European countries
  8. The documents were leaked to a journalist working for the German newspaper by a person using the pseudonym, John Doe.
  9. The Panama Papers show how vast the industry of secrecy and hiding money is. The scale of this leak has shifted the question away from whether there is a legitimate use of structures like tax havens in the name of privacy, to whether this vast scale of abuse can still be tolerated.
  10. There is no hiding from the fact that much of the money is corrupt: diverted from public funds, the relentless accumulation of bribes, or one of the other standard schemes that corrupt politicians, public officials, and business people have refined over the years
  11. It is an uncomfortable fact that more than 50% of the entities implicated are registered in the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies and that the professional enablers from the UK were the second biggest users of Mossack Fonseca’s services.
  12. The Panama Papers disclosed data from the years between 1977 and 2015 and shook the entire world with the shocking revolution. It had around 500 Indian names which included businessman Vijay Mallya, former Solicitor General of India Harish Salve, Bollywood personalities such as Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Ajay Devgn, Vinod Adani, elder brother of Gautam Adani, KP Singh, founder of Delhi-based DLF, etc.
  13. Pandora Papers are another such release of nearly 12 million leaked documents that reveal the hidden and sometimes unethical or corrupt dealings of the global wealthy and elite.
  14. It is the largest such data dump released to date larger than the previous Panama Papers leak.
  15. The term ‘Pandora’ was given to these documents as a reference to the ancient myth of Pandora’s box, which is associated with the outpouring of trouble and woe.
  16. The data were obtained over several years and released in the fall of 2021 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a group in Washington DC that has been working with more than 140 media organizations on its biggest-ever global investigation.
  17. The Pandora Papers uncovered a complex web of tax havens, shell corporations, and offshore accounts that hide the true ownership of billions of dollars of assets.
  18. According to the ICIJ, the people exposed include 35 current and former world leaders, more than 330 politicians and public officials in 91 countries and territories, and a global lineup of fugitives, con artists, and murderers.
  19. This cache includes 11.9 million files from companies hired by wealthy clients to create offshore structures and trusts in tax havens such as Panama, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands.
  20. Offshore structures are those countries or territories where it’s easy to set up companies, where there are laws that make it difficult to identify owners of companies, and where there is low or no corporation tax.
  21. The scrutiny of these papers reveals twofold objectives of setting up these trusts. These are (a) hiding real identities to make it next impossible for tax authorities to reach them and (b) safeguarding their investments from creditors and law enforcers such as cash, real estate, and shareholders.
  22. There are at least 380 persons of Indian nationality in the Pandora Papers Including prominent personalities like Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Ambani, Sister of fugitive jeweler Nirav Modi, Jackie Shroff, Niranjan Hiranandini, investments under the name of IPL teams-Rajasthan Royals, Kings XI Punjab, etc.
     

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