We always knew the super-rich were not entirely honest. That's how they became super rich; we knew that. Now, due to an uncredited source, leaks to a German newspaper and subsequent sharing to investigative journalists around the world, followed by a year of investigation and scrutiny, it has been confirmedthat a lot of people have been enriching themselves at the expense of the not-so-affluent. They have hidden their true worth to avoid taxes and other financial responsibilities and successfully rendered themselves criminal and therefore liable to prosecution. Like that's going to happen.
The revelations are based on the leak of 11 million documents from the files of the offshore financial law firm Mossack Fonseca, based in Panama. Panama as a tax haven is probably not such a good idea at the moment, particularly with that legal firm, but not all of their clients are criminals. Just an awful lot and they represent a staggering amount of the planet's capital worth.
Apart from criminal, there is a word to describe people who have obscene amounts of money and are obsessed with gathering more - greedy! These are people to whom the word "enough" means nothing. Not content with having more liquid assets than some countries, they want to defraud their fellow citizens out of more and more and more. It's not money to build a business and create job opportunities for millions; it is money to hoard for no other reason than to have it. The people stung in the Panama Papers had no intention of paying their rightful income tax or helping raise their fellow citizens' standard of living: they simply needed to wallow in cash to satisfy some longing to have more than anyone else.
There are many other such tax havens with many more criminally rich hoarding the world's wealth. Let's hope for more leaks and, above all, incorruptible real justice for those who have had to go without so others could become super rich.
