Panama Papers & Muclair

Saker wrote:
[On the PANAMA PAPER leak]
Remarkably, for all the hype, the target does not appear to be Russia. Likewise the Chinese revelations are not all that surprising or major ... The single country which finds itself the most exposed by these revelations is: the United Kingdom.

It is probably also not a coincidence that the information leak also targets a third, after UK and Hong-Kong, provider of financial services, namely Switzerland with about 1.200 intermediaries listed. The US, by contrast, though no slouch in the offshoring business, only has 400 firms listed on the Mossack-Fonseca list of intermediaries.

The beneficiaries are, without doubt, US financial firms. Panama Papers are serving notice that if one wants to engage in offshoring, in order to avoid unwanted publicity or legal scrutiny, one must do so through a major US firm with close ties to the US government, rather than some NSA-hackable British, Hong-Kong, or Swiss firm. One gets the distinctive impression that the US financial sector is trying to do away with its competition so as to centralize offshoring in its hands.

Bloomberg wrote:[From a January 2016 article - The World’s Favorite New Tax Haven Is the United States]
Last September, at a law firm overlooking San Francisco Bay, Andrew Penney, a managing director at Rothschild & Co., gave a talk on how the world’s wealthy elite can avoid paying taxes.

His message was clear: You can help your clients move their fortunes to the United States, free of taxes and hidden from their governments.

Some are calling it the new Switzerland.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/the-world-s-favorite-new-tax-haven-is-the-united-states

Bradley Birkenfeld is the most significant financial whistleblower of all time, after working as banker working at UBS in Switzerland.

Birkenfeld said that during his time as a Swiss banker, Mossack Fonseca was known as one piece of the vast offshore maze used by bankers and lawyers to hide money from tax authorities.

"We knew that firm very well in Switzerland. I certainly knew of it," Birkenfeld said.

But he also said that the firm that is at the center of the global scandal was also seen as a relatively small player in the overall offshore tax evasion business.

irkenfeld said he doesn't think the source of the 11 million documents stolen from a Panamanian law firm should automatically be considered a whistleblower like himself. Instead, he said, the hacking of the Panama City-based firm, called Mossack Fonseca, could have been done by a U.S. intelligence agency.

"Quite frankly, my feeling is that this is certainly an intelligence agency operation."

"The CIA I'm sure is behind this, in my opinion," Birkenfeld said.

"If you've got NSA and CIA spying on foreign governments they can certainly get into a law firm like this," Birkenfeld said. "But they selectively bring the information to the public domain that doesn't hurt the U.S. in any shape or form. That's wrong. And there's something seriously sinister here behind this."