The biggest leak of documents in history, connected with the Panamian law firm Mossack Fonseca showed how tax havens can be used to hide wealth. Thera are my ore than 11.5 million records and bout 2.6 terabytes of data, but roughly 200 Americans. Many have questioned why only a few Americans have been implicated so far.
The biggest leak of documents in history, connected with the Panamian law firm Mossack Fonseca showed how tax havens can be used to hide wealth. Thera are my ore than 11.5 million records and bout 2.6 terabytes of data, but roughly 200 Americans. Many have questioned why only a few Americans have been implicated so far.
According to BBC, US news outlet Fusion, which was part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that revealed the files, said journalists were able to identify 211 people with addresses in the US who owned companies in the data. But it was not clear if all of them were US citizens.
"A very small number of states are notorious for allowing pretty much anybody to start a company in the state without requiring even the most basic information," said Matthew Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy with Citizens for Tax Justice.
The International Business Times says there are several reasons why the United States might not have been a major source of clients for the Panamanian law firm, relatively speaking. Perhaps it deliberately avoided having a large presence in the United States, so as not to attract the attention of U.S. authorities. Or perhaps there was too much competition.
However, more names, via experts, could become clear as other files of the 11.5m leaked documents were examined. An editor with Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper that has been leading the investigation of the records, tweeted on Monday to "just wait" until more were released.
