Panama Papers - America, fraud yeah! [UPDATE]Pakistani PM DQ'd from holding public office

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Herdanos
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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Herdanos » Mon Apr 04, 2016 3:07 pm

Cal wrote:I was just reluctant to spell out the bleedin' obvious for fear of triggering Dan or Moggy to come in here accusing me of wearing my tin-foil hat.

That'd be the same Dan and Moggy who are trying to ignore you? ;)

You're making it hard for us though!

But if you're happy to parrot the views of a website that:

- calls abortion an 'agenda' without shame
- can compose sentences like "institutional left groups like Human Rights Watch, The Center for Reproductive Rights, And the Environmental Working Group" without any semblance of irony

and then sneer about the whole Sesame-Street-supporting group being "a liberal progressives' wet-dream-team", without any hint of self-awareness of just how far right you have become (shock fact: human rights aren't considered left wing anymore!) then it is pointless for me to even engage with you, as the disgusting nature of your views on the rights of other people speak for themselves.

I hope your life is better than the life you'd inflict upon others. Peace out.

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Eighthours
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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Eighthours » Mon Apr 04, 2016 5:05 pm

This is pretty eye-opening stuff that I have to delve into a lot more before being able to comment on it in an informed manner.

The offshore-tastic, tax-dodging Guardian Media Group is breaking its already pretty great hypocrisy record here, mind! The brass neck on them...

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by That » Mon Apr 04, 2016 5:11 pm

Although often quite legal, going so far out of your way just to dodge paying tax is something the vast majority of ordinary people would find morally wrong. I hope that these leaked papers are used to expose and embarrass as many people doing it as possible -- left or right, foreign or British, all should be named and shamed.

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Winckle » Mon Apr 04, 2016 6:00 pm

Eighthours wrote:This is pretty eye-opening stuff that I have to delve into a lot more before being able to comment on it in an informed manner.

The offshore-tastic, tax-dodging Guardian Media Group is breaking its already pretty great hypocrisy record here, mind! The brass neck on them...

I don't even like the Guardian, but that's whataboutery of the highest order.

We should migrate GRcade to Flarum. :toot:
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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Alvin Flummux » Mon Apr 04, 2016 8:13 pm

If the GMG is implicated here, I'm sure the other media groups (the Daily Mail etc al) will gleefully rip into it. I'm sure News Corp is looking for a reason to pounce.

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Poser » Mon Apr 04, 2016 10:00 pm

The Daily Mail is also owned by some sort of offshore arrangement.

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Saint of Killers » Mon Apr 04, 2016 10:15 pm

Are Guardian being hypocrites if their owners are engaged in avoidance but this leak deals with evasion, hidden assets and possible illegal practices?

But if there is anything dodgy going on with Guardian owners and their off-shore practices, then this is one hell of a target they're painting on themselves. :slol:

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Alvin Flummux » Mon Apr 04, 2016 10:29 pm

Poser wrote:The Daily Mail is also owned by some sort of offshore arrangement.


So, nobody's going to be attacking anybody for tax avoidance, because they're all up to it? :slol: strawberry float!

Again, I hope that some outside party just blows them all up.

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Qikz » Tue Apr 05, 2016 12:09 am

Karl wrote:Although often quite legal, going so far out of your way just to dodge paying tax is something the vast majority of ordinary people would find morally wrong. I hope that these leaked papers are used to expose and embarrass as many people doing it as possible -- left or right, foreign or British, all should be named and shamed.


This is how I view it.

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Shadow » Tue Apr 05, 2016 1:10 am

Cal wrote:
bear wrote:
Fade wrote:The sad thing is, your average Joe isn't going to give a strawberry float about any of this.

Well it looks like the Icelandic PM is going to be fired because of it and the government is on the brink of collapse so I respectfully disagree.

There's a huge amount of politicians across Europe who have been very successful because of their anti-austerity stance. Hypothetically, if Gerry Adams or Martin McGuinness were caught up in these sort of tax dodges then I'd imagine that Sinn Fein as a whole would take a hammering.


What would be very useful at this stage is for an independent legal view on all of this. Who controls this data dump (quite possibly stolen, btw)? The ICIJ? By what authority or legal permission are they trawling through this information? This is like a bunch of strangers getting hold of your bank details and deciding to make them publicly available. Anyone have a problem with this?

Under what legal right have these people acted? It's as if the ICIJ have decided personal financial privacy laws (and by implication the right to anonymity) no longer apply.


Wouldn't journalists be protected through Free Press legislation? They shouldn't be prevented from exposing crime and corruption because they've been given access to stolen documents.

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Green Gecko » Tue Apr 05, 2016 3:01 am

As far as I understand, journalists can publish anything that could be in the public interest and can't be proven to be false at that time (rarely a burden on proving something is true these days), especially when it comes to public, often elected government officials. Also, in most countries, incorporated bodies (ie companies) have public records, in fact there's no such thing as a private company. That's one reason tax havens and shell companies are used - to obfuscate assets. Private money is only private if you don't incorporate. Of course, you can't be a sole corporate entity (your self by name) in another country unless you're a citizen there, meaning you have to pay tax on your earnings wherever they come from. But move them overseas or generate those profits under a different set of laws but still be able to eventually draw those funds or spend them overseas, and you necessarily don't pay tax on that.. That's the general idea anyway.

The morale implication is that everyone should pay a fair share of tax relative to their earnings, as the wealth has been generated largely at the expense of others anyway, for the "greater good". It seems fair to me, at least, thaf profits made in the UK should pay back into the UK treasury. And don't forget, we're not usually talking about one or two people's salaries or share value in a company, we're talking about keeping massive wealth within corporate entities, with the potential to slowly pay out millions or even billions of dollars in salary or dividends to thousands of other shareholders (which can be individuals or other companies, themselves owned by yet more companies), without paying into the treasury for the betterment of society and the poor and sick. We're talking about companies simply sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars, more than any state in the world, that could stave off world hunger or eradicate an endemic or house the poor or endless other things if even a proportion of that wealth was actually used for something beneficiary instead of generating yet more wealth. Least that could be done is pay proper taxes.

Or just raze the entire system built to generate massive wealth disparity.

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Eighthours
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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Eighthours » Tue Apr 05, 2016 9:43 am

Tax evasion and avoidance are complex subjects when it comes to the reasons why the loopholes aren't closed down as judiciously as most of the public thinks they should be. The relationship between tax rates and implied threats to take business elsewhere and the balancing act between being seen to take action but not so much that you hurt people who can hurt you more...

A lot of people think that it's as simple as everyone having to pay their fair share, but every single country in the world would have to enact this policy at exactly the same time, putting aside their self-interest. Which is never going to happen. So collecting tax from offshore meanderings is essentially a game, a balancing act. There's no question that Osborne has been achieving more in this than previous Chancellors, but also no question that he isn't doing anything like as much as he could and will now face calls to prioritise such policies, which he will doubtless pay lip service to without really doubling down on it. If Jeremy Corbyn was in charge, he would also be wrestling with the questions, as it's not as easy as saying 'I'm shutting down all the loopholes on my first day in office'. This is a coordinated scandal which requires coordinated action, which is pretty difficult when many of these territories are partially reliant on the money from these offshore individuals and companies, not to mention the potential impact on jobs and business if you threaten to reduce the assets of major players. It's kinda blackmail, but just the way the world works. The money goes around in the end - not enough, certainly, but there is a big danger to economies here.

Let's say you make Starbucks pay all their tax. Are they going to continue to expand, employing hundreds or thousands more people in this country? Or are they going to start laying off staff, or increasing their prices to the point where the effect of the Treasury getting more tax leads to a disproportionately negative effect in the economy? Same with Google. Same with the banks - think of all the extra charges their customers would face, as these companies wouldn't think, 'Well, it's fine that we now have billions less in retained profit each year', they'd get that money back another way.

So it's not as easy as closing all the loopholes, it really isn't. Big companies have us over a barrel. We don't so much need to close all the loopholes, as completely rethink the concept of tax in the world economy. strawberry float knows how, though!

EDIT: I did like a tweet I saw this morning, which screamed, 'Why aren't we all on the streets asking whether David Cameron is still getting money from his father's offshore holdings?' Er...

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Poser » Tue Apr 05, 2016 9:52 am

Eighthours has nailed it.

Even beyond tax avoidance, the UK is a relative tax haven compared to, say, France. A couple of years ago companies were getting the hell out of France at every opportunity, because its corporate tax rates were so non-competitive. It has helped our economy grow.

I don't think there's a massive difference between, for example, the bailouts for the steel industry that people have been baying for, and the Government willfully turning a blind eye to tax avoidance in order to help the private sector prosper.

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Lex-Man » Tue Apr 05, 2016 10:35 am

Has anyone read that the firm was helping North Korea and Zimbabwe dodge sanctions. Which is very much illegal.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-35959604

The Panama legal firm at the heart of a massive data leak kept clients who were subject to international sanctions, documents show.
Mossack Fonseca worked with 33 individuals or companies who have been placed under sanctions by the US Treasury, including companies based in Iran, Zimbabwe and North Korea.
One had links to North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.
The information comes from the leak of 11m of the company's internal files.
Mossack Fonseca registers companies as offshore entities operated under its own name. This meant the identities of the real owners were hard to trace because they were kept out of public documents.
Live: Panama Papers reaction
All you need to know about the Panama Papers
Some of the businesses were registered before international sanctions were imposed. But in several cases Mossack Fonseca continued to act as a proxy for them after they were blacklisted.
DCB Finance was established in 2006, with its owners and directors based in North Korea's capital Pyongyang. It was later put under sanctions by the US Treasury for raising funds for the North Korean regime and being linked to a bank helping to fund the regime's nuclear weapons programme.

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Lex-Man » Tue Apr 05, 2016 11:05 am

Poser wrote:Eighthours has nailed it.

Even beyond tax avoidance, the UK is a relative tax haven compared to, say, France. A couple of years ago companies were getting the hell out of France at every opportunity, because its corporate tax rates were so non-competitive. It has helped our economy grow.

I don't think there's a massive difference between, for example, the bailouts for the steel industry that people have been baying for, and the Government willfully turning a blind eye to tax avoidance in order to help the private sector prosper.


There is also a lot of dodgy schemes that run in England. People buying property and land and stuff to hide stolen cash. Also this is a good article on the panama papers.

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/why-you- ... ck-fonseca

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Eighthours
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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Eighthours » Tue Apr 05, 2016 11:50 am

Poser wrote:I don't think there's a massive difference between, for example, the bailouts for the steel industry that people have been baying for, and the Government willfully turning a blind eye to tax avoidance in order to help the private sector prosper.


The proposed steel industry bailout is an example of how a wish not to be on the end of negative PR can beat out common sense. That plant is losing a million pounds a day. If this wasn't an industry with an emotive history, particularly considering the echoes of what happened to communities after the mines closed down, there's no way that anyone would be considering such a move. The number of jobs being lost is barely a flicker on the economic landscape. That's not to say that nothing should be done to help the community, not at all. Just that the idea of keeping a clearly failing business alive with taxpayers' money isn't good economics, sets a bad precedent, and is completely anti the attitude of people were, say, Starbucks laying off a thousand workers. And no, this is nothing like bailing out the banks.

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by That » Tue Apr 05, 2016 12:06 pm

@Eighthours: I actually live a stone's throw away from Port Talbot - I can see the steelworks out of my bathroom window - and I do worry about what will happen in that town and what the knock-on effects here in South Wales might be once Tata closes. Do you think there is a way to prevent that town of 40,000, which is currently entirely dependent on the forge - there is quite literally nothing else there, not even a decent high street! - from falling into poverty and becoming yet another post-industrial wasteland? The government line seems to focus on 're-skilling,' but how will we provide the (already highly-skilled) workers there with new training and new careers en masse? If the government keeping the steelworks open (even just temporarily, or in only a limited capacity) is the only way to ensure the community can survive with some dignity, and without mass welfare dependency and malcontent, then I think that should override the economics of the situation.

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Eighthours » Tue Apr 05, 2016 12:19 pm

Karl wrote:@Eighthours: I actually live a stone's throw away from Port Talbot - I can see the steelworks out of my bathroom window - and I do worry about what will happen in that town and what the knock-on effects here in South Wales might be once Tata closes. Do you think there is a way to prevent that town of 40,000, which is currently entirely dependent on the forge - there is quite literally nothing else there, not even a decent high street! - from falling into poverty and becoming yet another post-industrial wasteland? The government line seems to focus on 're-skilling,' but how will we provide the (already highly-skilled) workers there with new training and new careers en masse? If the government keeping the steelworks open (even just temporarily, or in only a limited capacity) is the only way to ensure the community can survive with some dignity, and without mass welfare dependency and malcontent, then I think that should override the economics of the situation.


Fair enough, Karl - I can certainly respect that viewpoint. But what's the medium term solution here?

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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by Trelliz » Tue Apr 05, 2016 12:31 pm


jawa2 wrote:Tl;dr Trelliz isn't a miserable git; he's right.
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PostRe: The Panama Papers - FIFA! Putin! <]:^D's dad!! (Not in it together but leak shows how they, and many others, hid £bn
by That » Tue Apr 05, 2016 12:34 pm

@Eighthours: Happy to admit I don't know! If the forge is going to lose the taxpayer money hand-over-fist then I would agree nationalisation can only be a short-term solution. Perhaps the plant could remain open in a limited capacity - preventing the breakdown of the community - while the new management (i.e. the government) runs training programmes for the workers and incentivises other manufacturing and tech businesses to move into the West Glamorgan area. Some kind of socialist five-year plan ( ;) sorry, couldn't resist) for the plant would surely be better than allowing the town to implode?

Don't get me wrong, I don't really disagree with you about the economics. I just think the government should present a solid plan for dealing with the human factor. Maybe that involves nationalisation, maybe it doesn't. I would be happy for the government to find a solution that doesn't involve keeping the steelworks open -- as long as, say, this time next year, there are still jobs in West Glamorgan for the people of Port Talbot to do.

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