Book Review: 'Secrecy World' by Jake Bernstein
The world of secret offshore companies is outrageous. The rich and corrupt, seeking to hide assets and income from taxes, set up shell companies, foundations and trusts – by the hundreds of thousands – every year. Despite the harm it does to local government and the likely illegality of it, the industry holds public trade shows and conferences where shady lawyers, accountants, financial planners and consultants flaunt their services. The numbers are mind-numbing: over $100 trillion hidden from view, costing middle class taxpayers trillions to make up the difference. The treasure trove of the Panama Papers has imposed a little sunshine here, in Secrecy World.
Jake Bernstein has followed the leads backwards and forwards. He fills in the
details of who the players are and how they got there. He also takes some minor
side trips to corrupt practices like drug dealing, a slave ship, abandoned
construction and a fraudulent reinsurer, to show how these players are actively
ruining the lives of others with their fake firms. There is even a side trip to
the Swiss tax-free art warehouses, where a good hundred billion dollars in
precious art is hidden from view and taxation.
SECRECY WORLD EXPLAINED on YouTube
The book is structured like a tree. Each of the roots gets an airing, and they
all lead up to the visible trunk – Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm
from which all the documents were leaked. The roots consist of Mossfon bureaus
around the world, dealing with various corrupt governments, corrupt banks and
eager clients. The crown is the billowing scandals the journalists perpetrated,
going off in many directions, covering the sky with corruption on a truly
global scale. Bernstein has an interesting style. He does with paragraphs what good writers
do with chapters – entice. His paragraphs become cliffhangers for the next
paragraph, keeping the reader hooked over a long, incredibly diverse and
involved exposé. He gives the Panama Papers worldwide relevance.
The roll call of leaders using hidden offshore accounts is a who’s who. The
perps include Vladimir Putin and his cabinet, Xi Jinping, Hosni Mubarak, Hafez
Al Assad, both Kirchners, the king of Saudi Arabia, Nawaz Sharif, the ruling
Aliyev family of Azerbaijan, David Cameron, Dick Cheney, the prime minister of
Iceland, the world football regulator FIFA, and Odebrecht. It seems like there
is not a single financial corruption case in the news today that does not pass
through the offices of Mossack Fonseca. And there is an entire chapter on
Donald Trump’s connections and dealings with Mossfon clients and their offshore
firms. They are his partners and friends.
The real hero of the story is the unique collaboration among journalists around
the world, called the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists,
where Bernstein works. They spent a year trying to make sense of the documents
and data. Their familiarity with their own country and region allowed them to
identify players and plug them into deals. There was so much data it took 33
8-processor Amazon servers to execute a search in parallel. 12 million
documents worth 2.6 terabytes had been sent to the group over many months. No
one knew when it would stop or what the final size might be or what it all
meant. More than 300 journalists in 65 countries researched the hoard, on a
deadline so they could all publish on the same day. And the
whistleblower/leaker/hacker has wisely remained unidentified, seeing what has
happened to the likes of Manning, Snowden and Assange.
Finally, with the decline of the huge offshoring operations in Panama,
Luxembourg and the BVI, the global leaders of this nefarious industry of
corruption are the US states of Delaware and Nevada.
More posts on the Panama Papers & tax havens
The Laundromat | Official Trailer : A widow (Meryl Streep) investigates an insurance fraud, chasing leads to a pair of Panama City law partners (Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas) exploiting the world’s financial system. Steven Soderbergh directs
Dilip Simeon - The Currency of sentiment, or What
is corruption?
