Eli5: what are the Panama Papers and what did they expose?
In: Culture
Do you want to get assassinated?
The Panama Papers have some interesting revelations about where some serious sums of illegitimate money are being held. For one example, there is a multibillion dollar account from a close friend of Putin that potentially suggest funneling of Russian taxpayer funds offshore to be lavishly spent in western countries at the expense of the Russian people.
My source on that is just connecting the dots from the book Red Notice by William Browder. Some of the funds involved in the Russian tax rebate scandal that Magnitsky uncovered were linked to that account IIRC. When magnitsky act was passed, the funds that the oligarchs (those involved in gross human rights violations at least) had been funneling offshore were in jeopardy.
They exposed that the rich can keep all their cash and nothing will be done about it except that any whistleblowers will be murdered.
Here in Argentina, our president and cabinet were involved in this scandal but nothing happened.
Is there a list of people that this incriminated? I always hear “wealthy, famous, rich, politicians” but that doesn’t help me know if I need to start fighting my local politicians or trash talking a celebrity.
Let’s imagine you’re a kid living in a neighborhood with a number of other children. You and all your friends have started lemonade stands and have started to make money. At the end of the day, you take your money and put it in your piggy bank in your room, but you have to tell your parents whenever you do this, and how much you put in your piggy bank. They also tell you that you can’t take out more than $10 at a time unless you tell them what it is for, and they have to approve of the spending. Most of the other kids have to do the same. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Your parents maybe just want to make sure that you are keeping track of your money and not spending it on bad things.
One day you hear from one of your friends that little Billy down the road doesn’t have to tell his parents when he puts money in his piggy bank. They don’t really care what he does with his money, and don’t keep track of how much he has and takes out. One day you decide that you don’t want your parents keeping track of your money, and you start keeping some, if not all, of your money in Billy’s piggy bank. You’re not even doing this for bad reasons. Maybe your trying to save up money to buy your mom a new necklace, or your dad a new golf club, and don’t want them knowing about it before hand. What a sweet kid you are.
But not all the other kids are as sweet as you. Other kids start keeping their money in Billy’s piggy bank too, but unlike you, they’re doing so because they want to start using their money for things that their parents wouldn’t approve of, and this keeps their parents from being able to keep tabs on how much money they make at their lemonade stands, and how much they spend on things.
Well, somebody snitched and now all the parents know about their kids hiding their money at Billy’s, and that many of those kids were doing so for bad reasons.
Imagine it’s Halloween and you just went trick or treating with your friends. You all collect a big bucket of candy which you want to eat all by yourselves.
The prolem is that when you get home your parents will want some of your candy as well. But it’s not just your parents who do this, all of the parents on your street take some candy from their kids when they come back from trick or treating. You get a bit annoyed because you wanted to eat the candy on your own, but you move on and start eating the candy that they left you.
The next day at school you start talking with your friends, and you bring up how you hate it that your parents take 5 candy bars from you each time. Your best friend gets upset because his parents take 10 candy bars from him each time.
Then one kid at the table then says that his parents only take away 1 candy bar each time he goes trick or treating. You’re all outraged at how much your parents are taking away from you, and you wish you could find a way you could somehow give away less of your candy.
The kid then tells you that he can keep your candy safe from your parents at his house if you give him 2 candy bars as a fee. You quickly realise that the 2 candy bars you lose to this kid plus the other candy bar his parents would take still leaves you with 2 candy bars more than if you were to just take the candy home with you.
Many other kids on your street start to keep their candy safe with this kid, and you all think that you’ve come up with the perfect plan to keep as much candy for yourselves as possible until one day a teacher finds out what has been happening and sends an email to all the parents.
Your parents are furious, but since you didn’t break any of the house rules by keeping candy at a friend’s house, they can’t punish you for it. If you had sneaked in the candy and hidden it in your room, then you would have broken the rule about hiding candy from your parents, but by keeping it at a friend’s place with the knowledge and consent of his parents you’re not actually breaking any rules since nobody thought to put that in the rules.
The same thing happens to all of your friends. Their parents got mad, but couldn’t do anything about it. This means that the kid who keeps the candy bars safe can just keep hiding candy for a small fee. His parents don’t want to speak up or increase how much candy they take because they keep getting lots of candy coming through the door. The fact that they only took one candy bar is what allowed them to get so much of it.
This is a problem, though. There is a children’s hospital a few blocks down the street to which your parents used to donate the candy they took from you. Since you and all your friends keep your candy out of reach of your parents, the hospital gets much smaller donations of candy each year, and it’s starting to not be enough to make the sick kids inside happy on Halloween.
This leaves you with kids that have lots of candy just getting more and more, but all of it is inconveniently out of reach (you can own the candy but not eat it because it’s in a different house). Kids that don’t get enough candy to afford the fee for safekeeping end up losing more candy bars to their parents than all the kids who have lots. The sick kids who can’t go trick or treating also suffer since the hospital isn’t able to provide them with enough candy anymore.
Most people on your street agree that this is a problem, but there is no incentive for anyone to change the system anymore, since all they can think about is keeping as much candy as possible for themselves.
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It was a great scandal and probed conspiracy. Still literally nothing happened to the responsable people nor to the system which allow their scheme.
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