05 April 2016 - 'Panama Papers' Leak

Panama Papers: David Cameron urged to act as UK named 'at heart of super-rich tax-avoidance network'
Charlie Cooper, Jim Armitage and Cahal Milmo (The Independent, 05/04/2016)

David Cameron is facing calls for urgent action against tax havens in UK overseas territories and Crown Dependencies, as Britain was revealed to be at the heart of a shadowy global network of companies used by the super-rich to hide their wealth.
Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn will accuse the Prime Minister of only paying lip service to the issue of offshore tax havens in a speech later on Tuesday.
As tax authorities around the world were spurred to action by the release of 11.5m documents leaked from the secretive Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca, revealing how it helped clients dodge taxes and international sanctions, UK campaigners for tax justice reacted with dismay as it emerged that half of the companies exposed were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.

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The Guardian view on the Panama Papers: secret riches and public rage
Editorial (The Guardian, 04/04/2016)
Thousands of companies, millions of documents and terabytes of data. The sprawling trail of secrets nestled within stretches from Reykjavik to Kiev and on to Islamabad by way of Baghdad. It has taken journalists in 80 countries months to tease it all out from the record-breaking bulk of the Panama Papers. Each of these disparate stories matters in itself. But what has also broken out of the vaults of offshore legal specialists Mossack Fonseca is one over-riding sense. The sense that normal rules do not apply to the global elite. In a new gilded age, taxes would – once again – appear to be for the little people.
That impression would be poisonous at any time, but it could be especially dangerous in the politics of this particular hour. The response to the financial crisis has been a constant: with a continual demand for regular citizens to make sacrifices in the name of austerity. But the understanding of what had gone wrong in the first place has steadily shifted. Initially, there was almost no understanding at all: baffling news reports about credit default swaps suggested only sorcery going wrong. Slowly but surely, however, the world has learned that the banks that busted the global economy were also consumed with old-fashioned skulduggery: rigging rates, ripping off customers, and laundering Mexican drug money. Courtesy of the Lux tax leaks on sweetheart corporate deals, and the HSBC files, documenting Swiss lockers stacked with bricks of cash, the world learned much more, too, about the tax-dodging lengths that private wealth will go to in order to keep public coffers empty.

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Panama Papers: David Cameron silent on whether family money remains in Caribbean tax shelter
Christopher Hope and Michael Wilkinson (The Telegraph, 04/04/2016)

David Cameron has refused to say whether any of his family's money is still held offshore in a Caribbean tax haven after it emerged that his late father Ian ran an offshore fund which avoided paying tax in Britain by hiring Bahamanian residents, including a bishop, to sign paperwork.
Mr Cameron's family links to an offshore tax shelter have re-emerged just as the Prime Minister prepares to host and chair an anti-corruption summit of charities, non-governmental bodies and world leaders to encourage more tax transparency in London next month.
Ian Cameron's name was in more than 11 million leaked documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca that were passed to German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to 107 media organisations including The Guardian and BBC's Panorama.
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