Seven Ways to Change the World by Gordon Brown

Author:Gordon Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2021-06-10T00:00:00+00:00

Lifting the lid

We are now in a much better position to ensure the transparency, disclosure and automatic exchange of the information we need. That is largely thanks to action following the disclosure of a huge volume of secret documents to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2016 – the Panama Papers. Included in the original release were 12.7 million files and more than forty years of data from a tiny law firm, Mossack Fonseca, based in Panama. Despite its small size, it was nonetheless one of the world’s leading creators of shell companies – advising the world’s elites on how to sequester their money offshore. Enclosed in the files were exposés on world political leaders – including the prime minister of Iceland, the president of Ukraine and the king of Saudi Arabia – as well as drug traffickers, celebrities, billionaires and more. More than 200 countries around the world were found to be connected to this one small firm in Panama.23

And the subsequent release of the Paradise Papers – 13.4 million files held by Appleby, a leading offshore law firm with offices in Bermuda – implicated some of the world’s most prestigious royal families, as well as major donors to, and members of, President Trump’s administration. For example, Wilbur Ross, Trump’s commerce secretary, was shown via the Appleby documents to have used a web of Cayman dealings to retain a financial stake in Navigator Holdings, a shipping company that includes, among its top clients, Sibur, a Kremlin-linked energy firm, which, in 2016, had paid Navigator more than $23 million. Kirill Shamalov (ex-son-in-law of the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin) and Gennady Timchenko (a billionaire sanctioned by the US government in 2014 because of his links to Putin) both have large shares in the company. Another major Navigator client is PDVSA, a state-owned oil company controlled by the authoritarian Nicolás Maduro, president of Venezuela – a nation sanctioned by the Trump administration.24

No US ethics report had uncovered any of this; it took the Paradise Papers to expose enormous potential conflicts of interest concealed within Cayman holdings. And it was thanks to the Panama and Paradise Papers that we learned the full extent of the taxes that go unpaid by major multinationals. We should not have to rely on leaks for information on decades of malpractice as our main weapon in the battle against global tax injustice. What is needed is broadly based, effective, international action that will uncover and deal with persistent offending.

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