The Panama Papers

Don't know about you but I returned it...

I'm not saying the story itself is not important just maybe the writers behind the story do not necessarily make a good storyteller ... Rather read the news reports on this

2 of 3 people found this review helpful

Intelligent Electorate Required

The late billionaire heiress Leona Helmsley said it best "only little people pay taxes". SIGH!!

highly recommended for the ears of the 99% and 1%

Sickening to learn that 1) the majority of native Africans [and those severely disadvantaged in other regions] are in their plight due to the amoral deeds of their supposedly elected leaders conspiring with crooked law firms and "The 1%" to steal the wealth of the governed and 2) that the financial crisis of '07/'08 could have been prevented if individuals (including corporations deemed to be equivalent to individuals with the 14th amendment of the U. S. Constitution) couldn't evade their tax obligations as to which the 99% must adhere.

It’s a good process story

I bought the book thinking it was going to do a deep dive into actual Panama Papers issues and while ultimately good, was not the book I was expecting.

The fact that power people walk the legal line to obfuscate the source of monies for various/nefarious reasons, is a critically important issue, but in light of the fact that the team had unique access to the information for such a protracted amount of time, I thought we were going to learn of the skeletons in the closet, not just the location and minders of said closet.

All said, bravo to the team and thank you for your efforts.

great material

just a lot ,and the narrator has a m0notone like watching paint dry. I kept trying to listen and fall asleep to forever to get through

incredible story

love the story and the connecting pieces of puzzle chapter after chapter. this book is must read

Eye opening

This book is entertaining as it is educational. It is a fantastic introduction into the inner workings of off-shore companies by the people who organized the distribution of the panama papers.

Perfect in every way

Not to be missed. Very well written and read. the subject matter is told in way that you do it have to have any prior knowledge about it to understand and find it fascinating.

World's offshore finance mapped; big names named

Folks worldwide have endless reasons to make assets disappear from the jurisdiction and reach of the place they reside. Many have varied reasons to pipe those assets to shadowy destinations. In some (surely not all) of those shadows lurk ghastly arms transfers, bigtime drugs, criminal networks, terror. Or, some well-off clients may have more pedestrian aims such as hiding assets from divorce, the tax-man, or other rightful owners (or, to be charitable, maybe some wrongful claimants). Imagine that huge lootings are going on of various resources in Africa. Yes, one can imagine mixed in here and there, a benign purpose such as not being looted of legitimate hard-earned wealth, from exposure in some places to some nasty political risk -- local chiefs always lurk to bleed the successful. Plenty of countries and characters have some mishmash of these things. There is a huge flow of wealth around the world "off the books." In the trillions, these authors maintain, citing other sources.
How edifying to these folks, to know there is a full-service law firm or two in sunny Panama to grease and facilitate this process. I had thought George H. W. Bush cleaned things up down there, in the Noriega days. NOT. We come to find there are whole countries whose business model is to facilitate this stuff. Some mighty big and rich. Many in the heart (or fringes) of Europe. Plenty just south of Florida. There are islands that must be almost sinking with all the filthy lucre stashed there. There are inshore "islands": Nevada and Montana have, or had, outposts of this firm.
As for big names, and keeping in mind I am not equating these to each other, or claiming the worst for any of them (see the text for plenty of juicy details), here is just a taste: family and close friends of Putin, Syria's Assad, Chinese mainland top inner circles, recent PM Cameron of the UK (though he is seemingly more benign than others), a recent Icelandic PM (deposed by of this very scandal), various tinpot dictators, big arms and diamond merchants, recipients of Nazi lootings, and beneficiaries of more recent, less famous, but comparable lootings all over the place. I do not intend to tar these different names/people with the same brush. Each case its its own. But meanwhile, localities starve for revenues partly because of the sweetheart deals of their bosses through this overall system. The firm prates about compliance, diligence and so on, but its leaked files tend to differ about that. Across the wider canvas, money, commodities and so on flow in and out of our "legitimate" banking systems seemingly almost effortlessly. At its worst, this book gets very preachy about this stuff (but fortunately ladles it on sparingly -- I think this material speaks eloquently for itself). I guess all that signals sincerity by the authors. Newsflash: this is not Kumbaya World.
Sadly, nobody (at this house) has time to do a real statistical run on the multiple terabytes, to truly deeply assess the story of this law firm. Flashy stuff was searched for, and it was found.
Another feature for easy hire here is a straw person who signs papers for the offshore entity -- these are hired by this law firm apparently to sign blank papers all day, the use and words to be filled in later. It is easy, we see in this "cookbook," to make a true owner of assets -- simply -- disappear. Things like international bribery become mouse-click stuff.
Here the prose is crisp, the trail of bread crumbs well mapped. The authors took time to be readable and move the reader along, dropping little hints to keep interest piqued. I found it easy to listen to, and plenty engaging. The back-story is great -- a fleeing Waffen SS man from Germany who worked briefly for the CIA, slipped into Panama, and then his son forms this law firm? Great pulpy novel stuff!
Now a problem: the biggest dilemmas of our day are embodied in this book. My college students seem mostly utterly clueless as to what they and their parents gave away: any pretense of privacy. The world as a glass house with info leaks everywhere is no unalloyed good. It is partly terrifying. I note that wikileaks dumped more from Hillary Clinton's past doings than was ever dreamed of in the Watergate scandal (circa 1973) that gripped world news globally for months, even years, and toppled a US presidency with historic fallout. (Nixon's term was prescient in showing a world of tactical leaks.) Now the general silence or indifference or ignorance around this kind of every-bit-as-serious-type-of-event is deafening. It's another feature of this offshore world of sudden transparencies and newly anonymous actors that some pretty nasty people are using this sort of thing strategically and tactically. Bedfellows are invisible in the offshore and virtual world. The world of spy paranoia has engulfed us. Here, the confidentiality of a law firm and its clients was violated, and doubtless many laws. On one hand, this should be quite worrying. Which brings up the nagging question here: what actor, state-based or otherwise, could infiltrate this law firm and, for supposedly no reward (while risking his/her/its life, it appears), dump multiple terabytes of its documents into the hands of two (self-proclaiming) well-meaning idealistic reporters? I'm a suspicious type, and this has spook written all over it. Look for the holes in the doughnut: who is signally NOT being exposed here? And there is the dilemma: being invited to join (and fund) this voyeurism, this evolving process. And now, it is said, United States' Department of Justice is scrutinizing this stuff. And where it stops nobody knows. It is for a good purpose, one can only (nervously) hope (or rationalize). This is the tragic story of our age, as the last ponds of privacy are drained. At a certain point of evaporation a state-change happens and the whole environment shifts to a new equilibrium, perhaps not benign. The world is already halfway colorful dirty tabloid. But I tend to see no eternal white or black hats, only endless shades of gray, and ever-shifting map of vulnerabilities, with creeps of all stripes to exploit them. Ask not for whom the vulnerabilities toll. They toll for you and me, and for what we used to call the reliable frameworks and sanctities of our lives. Strap in, its a wild toboggan ride!

3 of 6 people found this review helpful

I shake my head in disgust.

Fascinating how far the Uber wealthy will go to screw the rest of us. Terrible people.

0 of 4 people found this review helpful