Paradise Papers
An enormous new leak of more than 13 million financial documents has revealed how the powerful and ultra-wealthy, including Bono, Apple, Nike, Facebook, Twitter and the British queen’s private estate, secretly benefit from offshore tax havens.
The vast majority of the transactions involve no legal wrongdoing. Basically, the leak shows us in detail how the rich legally hide money to circumvent taxation that regular people are subjected to.
‘One set of nice rules for the super-rich and another for the rest‘
The Paradise Papers include nearly 7 million loan agreements, financial statements, emails, trust deeds and other paperwork from nearly 50 years at Appleby, a leading offshore law firm with offices in Bermuda and beyond.
The papers cover the period from 1950 to 2016.
Why Are They Called the Paradise Papers?
The leaks were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which also received the Panama Papers last year. The offshore tax havens in this set of leaks are paradisiacal locales.
There are secret details from corporate registries maintained by governments in Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Labuan (Malaysia), Malta, the Marshall Islands, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent, Samoa, Trinidad and Tobago, and Vanuatu.
Sources for further reading:
https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/about/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/05/what-are-the-paradise-papers-and-what-do-they-tell-us