The Panama Papers: Personal Greed Still Beats the Public Good
On Sunday, Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed that it received what is the largest leak of offshore financial information.
All information on the biggest data-leak: https://t.co/KsSuPDHG3F #panamapapershttps://t.co/Glg7u0LnQl
— Süddeutsche Zeitung (@SZ) April 3, 2016
The leak, which has been dubbed the Panama Papers, contains emails, pictures, financials etc. on offshore structures managed by Mossack Fonseca. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is currently maintaining a database of the confirmed connections being made to country leaders and government officials and their relatives:
https://projects.icij.org/panama-papers/power-players/?lang=en#1
The information that has been leaked is not necessarily incriminating. Moving assets to offshore accounts is an entirely legal process. It is necessary for businesspeople in certain countries to do so to protect their wealth from criminal raids on their accounts. They also serve as an alternative to local currencies for keeping assets. But obviously, this isn’t what is causing the scandal. It is evident that many of these accounts are being used to dodge taxes.
It strikes people as particularly nasty when many of the investigated accounts have government officials as beneficiaries. Many states assumed the identity of a nation-state, where the government is supposed to represent a people and their interests.
Scandals like the Panama Papers taint this notion and ruin the illusion. Paying taxes is supposed to be the ultimate form of patriotism, and yet there are several government officials actively avoiding taxes that are used to support the same governments for which they are working. Like the many atrocities that we are still facing today, institutionalized racism, the military-industrial complex, and the rise of terrorism, the Panama Papers shows the worst kind of elitist hypocrisy: calling for national unity under a common purpose while actually promoting self-interest over national interest.
Originally published at sanuber.wordpress.com on April 4, 2016.
