Emendata

the Panama Papers

• So, today I will talk about the Panama Papers.

• The Panama Papers are a set of 11.5 million confidential documents, for example E-Mails, letters, messages, foundation and credit agreements, bills, bank statements and photographies and were given anonymously to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which elaborated together with other medias the material and published the results on the 3th of abril.

• The Panama Papers provided information about 214.000 offshore companies at the whole world.

• Which companies?

• The 10 favourite countries, because of their tax and company laws are: Australia, China, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapur, Thailand, Vietnam, and, finally, on the 17th place there is Panama, which is responsible now for the rumour in the newspapers.

• So in Panama there is an agency which founds off-shore companies for his clients.

• And this agency is named Mossak Fonseca and is leaded, how the name already says, by the german Jürgen Mossak and Ramón Fonseca from Panama.

• Together they founded more than 300.000 offshore-companies in 21 tax havens for 14.000 clients.

• The problem is that these companies are not always founded for legal reasons, but also for tax evasion, money laundry or to avoid sanctions.

• For example Mossak Fonseca offered their clients to lead the company in the name of their employee and not in the name of the clients.

• In the secret documents are mentioned about 143 high-ranking politicians, people who are sanctioned by the UN and also drug bosses and terrorists.

• So, the companies were used to make their capital anonymous, to hide it for not paying taxes or because the unknown account wasn’t affected by the UN-sanctions, because of the anonymity.

• For example the off-shore companies made it possible to sell kerosene produced by the United Arab Emirates to the government of Syria.

• This is not actually allowed because of the sanctions due to the Syrian war.

• Who is involved?

• The investigations are really difficult, because they have 44 offices in the whole world.

• At the moment they are proving all the materials and last week they did a raid in their head quarter in Panama.

• I´m sure there are more people involved than we know now, but it’s already quite shocking that there are involved so many famous persons.

• For example: the boss of the Hypo Bank Michael Grahammer, the boss of the FIFA Gianni Infantino, the Russian president Vladimir Putin, the ucrainian president Petro Poroschenko, the president of Island David Gunnlaugsson, the president of Argentinia Mauricio Macri, the British prime minister David Cameron, the head of China Xi Jinping, the politician of France Marine Le Pen, Lionel Messi and also our Raiffeisen bank.

• In conclusion I would like to add that the results of the Papers started a discussion about how we can avoid avoid tax havens and how we can improve our laws about tax evasion and offshore companies.