Eat the rich? What are the Panama Papers, and why they are important.
The Panama Papers were leaked 115. million documents that the Panamanian-based law firm Mossack Fonseca gathered that revealed secret shell companies and bank accounts that had been established by the most wealthy politicians and celebrities to either avoid taxes, create sanctions or condone illegal business dealings. Either way, the documents detail information dating back to 1977, when the firm was founded and was released back five years ago, in 2015.
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The documents were released by an anonymous source through an unauthorized disclosure, and reported that the owners who belonged to several countries including the U.S, Britain, Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil, China, Russia; the offshore companies were registered predominantly in the British Virgin Islands, Panama, the Bahamas, Niue, Samoa, and the Seychelles. The Panama Papers were leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, and it was analyzed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists where close to 400 respective journalists, coming from over 100 news organizations from 76 countries, worked for a year to uncover that the offshore investments were associated with close to 140 politicians, or connected to their families including leaders from Russia, Pakistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Iceland, Britain, and prominent officials in China. Both Prime Ministers Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson of Iceland and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan resigned, in 2016 and 2017. The firm in question, denied any wrongdoings in it’s handlings of the investigations, and claimed that all dealings in it’s shell companies were perfectly legal, but that didn’t stop Panama’s police to raid the firm and arrest it’s founders on chargers on money laundering, where they spent months in jail.
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So, what does this mean? It means that the rich have too much power, especially politicians. Amongst millennials, we have this claim to ‘eat the rich’ because we understand that it’s easy to become corrupted by the very things poor people never will have. The privilege to have, buy and afford whatever you desire on a whim. There are no consequences to your actions if the average person doesn’t know what you did, or how you did it, was illegal. These people have the money and the power to fix the world, end global hunger, fix homelessness, and create a better plan to combat climate change, but they decided to keep their money to themselves out of greed and the illusion of power. I, as a young millennial, had not known about the Panama Papers, and this story came out in 2015. But that doesn’t mean that nothing happened to combat it. In late 2018 the U.S. Justice Department indicted several people associated with the schemes, billions in stolen assets were returned to their citizens, and 82 consecutive countries changed their laws to crack down on the stolen wealth hoarding the papers revealed. And it was all thanks to the journalist who led the investigation: Daphne Caruana Galizia from Malta, who had a personal blog called Running Commentary. She was murdered on October 16, 2017, and her work is what laid the groundwork for the Panama Papers, and we all owe a debt of gratitude to her and the other hundreds of journalists who worked to change, and better the world.
