La Jornada: Editorial
Translated by Melanie Orr
After a number of documents about the use of offshore shell companies and three-way money transfers by politicians, public servants, businessmen, criminals, sports personalities and entertainment stars were leaked worldwide, government officials and those implicated have reacted with a shocking combination of childishness and hypocrisy. “It will be investigated,” is the general response from the Public Defenders Offices in the countries where the owners of the transferred funds and the fictitious companies live. Several of those implicated in these operations, which are not explicitly illegal, state that “these are false allegations”.
Nevertheless, these activities seem shady and unscrupulous at best as others admit to owning or having owned offshore shell companies, but claim that they were never used for criminal ends. However, they neglect to mention the reasons that led them to hide away astronomical sums in “tax havens” via offshore companies.
It is relevant to consider that the case of the #panamapapers leak - where millions of documents were leaked from the Panama-based consulting firm Mossack Fonseca - not only shines a light on the regular practices of numerous members of the world’s elite, of their families and co-workers, but also the astonishing permissiveness of international financial systems. They seem to be designed not to control the dubious flows of substantial capital, but rather to allow them or to only detect them as an exception.
Evidence of this is the need to combine an unprecedented leak and the work of hundreds of journalists from dozens of countries to make the public aware of the disgraceful practices of individuals who should be examples of integrity and transparency due to their political, economic or social standing, as well as the enthusiastic participation of a large part of the commercial banking sector in less dubious financial operations. An example, which was perhaps involuntary, of the governments’ helplessness to check suspect cash movements came from the French President, François Hollande, who “welcomed” the leaks for exposing different well-known people, resulting in “increases in our taxable income from those who committed fraud”.
An infuriating aspect of the scandal is that it serves to illustrate, once again, the growing resistance of political and corporate hypocrisy to media exposés, a phenomenon that the WikiLeaks revelations could have established already- in 2010 and 2011- along with the information that Edward Snowden made public in 2013. Apart from a handful of resignations and some isolated political friction, the immoral and even criminal conduct which such leaks have brought to light has not provoked political turmoil in the most heavily implicated governments, as they should have done.
An extreme example of this is the illegal and intrusive espionage system that the U.S. government runs all over the world: while Richard Nixon was pushed to resign in 1973 over the Watergate scandal- stemming from the revelation that the former president had ordered phone calls to be monitored at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington-, Barack Obama did not suffer any significant political damage after it was discovered that his administration was spying on millions of people- prominent figures and normal citizens- both on U.S. soil and abroad.
So, it is clear that the key message which can be taken from the reactions to the #panamapapers scandal is that if societies do not recover their capacity for indignation and do not come together to demand both a deep cleansing of the international financial system and rigorous and comprehensive legal investigations of Mossack Fonseca’s clients, then a lack of transparency will have won the day. As a result of this, billions of dollars from public assets will continue to be privatized and disappear for the personal benefit of a handful of individuals. Spanish original.