Here we go again. In the latest revelations, widespread tax cheating and secret offshore financial manipulations hide massive amounts of wealth, both ill-gotten and ordinary corporate profits. The International Association of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has released “The Paradise Papers,” millions of documents that provide new devastating evidence of the history and current efforts of the most powerful and wealthy individuals, criminals and corporations in the world to hide their wealth and avoid responsibilities.
Release of “The Panama Papers” did a similar service about a year before the release of the “Paradise Papers.” As the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists put it, “A giant leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal records exposes a system that enables crime, corruption and wrongdoing, hidden by secretive offshore companies.” The Panama Papers had exposed how criminals, politicians, wealthy individuals, and major corporations have hidden cash and other assets with the help of the legal maneuvering and loophole exploiting made possible by the Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca. Panama police have since arrested the founders of Mossack Fonseca as part of money laundering investigations.
Given what we have learned from the Panama Papers, it seemed unlikely that Mossack Fonseca could be the only offshore law firm operating to facilitate international criminal financial dealings. Well, sure enough, The Paradise Papers, also released by the ICIJ, reveal another giant complex of operations, this time exposed by the release of 13.4 million records. The release was shared by the ICIJ with major news outlets, including the Guardian, the BBC, and the New York Times. The documents exposed “ties between Russia and U.S. President Donald Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary, the secret dealings of the chief fundraiser for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the offshore interests of the queen of England and more than 120 politicians around the world.” According to the ICIJ,
“The leaked documents, dubbed the Paradise Papers, show how deeply the offshore financial system is entangled with the overlapping worlds of political players, private wealth and corporate giants, including Apple, Nike, Uber and other global companies that avoid taxes through increasingly imaginative bookkeeping maneuvers.”
I was not surprised to learn that the Paradise Papers revealed ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, a private equity tycoon. His shipping company (which he did not divest when taking office as promised) “has received more than $68 million in revenue since 2014 from a Russian energy company co-owned by the son-in-law of Russian President Vladimir Putin.” Furthermore, the Paradise Papers implicate over a dozen of Trump’s cabinet members and major donors in the financial manipulations exposed by the documents.
So, what does it all mean? Is it merely a matter of the wealthy paying to have their money managed effectively by specialists? Well, it runs much deeper. Brooke Harrington, a certified wealth manager, Copenhagen Business School professor and author of Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, suggests otherwise. The ICIJ quotes Harrington as follows: “There is this small group of people who are not equally subject to the laws as the rest of us, and that’s on purpose,” They “live the dream” of enjoying “the benefits of society without being subject to any of its constraints.” And, of course, the benefits they enjoy so far surpass what the rest of us can even imagine, that the constraints they avoid deeply damage the public interest around the world.
That, of course, is what Trumpism is all about. Every cabinet appointment, every executive order, every tweet of this “empty clown suite” aims to suppress the modest protections of the people, the land and resources of the nation from the predatory behavior of the oligarchs he represents. The line between legal and criminal behavior of the worlds oligarchs, with whom Trump has been entangled for many years, is quite blurry. The power of using agents like offshore law firm, Appleby by drug traffickers, kleptocrats, and money launderers to hide criminally obtained money, draws the world’s biggest oligarchs, politicians, and criminals together in both their financial interests and their methods of seeking secrecy.
Only the amazing coordinated research by dozens of ICIJ members could have exposed the “Offshore Magic Circle,” an informal collection of the world’s biggest offshore law firms in the financial secrecy business, of which Bermuda based Appleby, exposed in the Paradise Papers, is only one member. Multiple unexplored offshore tax havens serve the special interests of greed, corruption, and criminality of the world’s oligarchs. We don’t know to what extent the current U.S. President is a player or merely a pretender to plutocratic power, but we do know that his key associates are engaged in the middle of the Paradise for Plutocrats.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 