Just read about the Panama papers very briefly and can’t really get a full grip of what it is, just the gist…
In: Economics
It was a giant leak of documents from a Panama-based financial services company that mainly dealt with wealthy people’s private bank accounts in tax havens using shell companies. You know the stereotype of the ‘Swiss bank account’ being used to hide large sums of money in foreign countries where your home government couldn’t tax it? That’s basically this, but mainly in Caribbean nations nowadays.
People named in the documents included heads of state, relatives of royals, government officials, businessmen, celebrities, and more. The majority of them were from Europe, the Middle East, and South America, with the highest ranking person named being King Salman of Saudi Arabia. Lots of people involved in FIFA were named, including their President.
While this is generally scummy, it’s not necessarily illegal in and of itself in most countries due to loopholes(hell, the fact that it’s legal is why so many people went for it in the first place). However, some of the shell companies set up were involved in things like fraud, organized crime, and terrorism.
One of the more notable things that resulted from the investigation was a political crisis in the Mediterranean island nation of Malta. Maltese journalist [Daphne Caruana Galizia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia), who was in the middle of investigating ties between shell companies the Panama Papers to both the Maltese government and organized crime, was killed by a car bomb. It’s believed that she was killed by the mob with the aid of a prominent Maltese casino owner who had shell companies mentioned in the Papers. Investigations into her death not only revealed that several cabinet ministers were involved in shell companies in the Papers, but that the Prime Minister had also tried to stymie the murder investigation to protect his reputation. General outrage over both his cabinet’s corruption and his stonewalling the investigation led to his resignation in 2019.
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