The Panama Papers & Wolves in Suits: Highlighting Inequality and Illegality in a Global Capitali

When on April 3rd 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) leaked over 11.5 million documents detailing the financial action of more than 214,000 offshore companies linked with the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, the world was shocked by its revelations. The leak of what is know referred to as the ‘Panama Papers’ was described by the ICIJ as “likely to be one of the most explosive in the nature of its revelations”. Indeed the Panama Papers were far from short of shocking revelations. Not only did the Panama Papers give unprecedented insight into the world of offshore banking and large-scale tax evasion, it revealed the legal and illegal involvement of 143 political figures, twelve of which are national leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson. When the papers revealed the former’s ownership of numerous secretive offshore companies and sparked a series of protests in the countries, Gunnlaugsson was forced to resign his role as national leader. Needless to say, the vast and ground-breaking consequences and revelations of the Panama Papers leak are only beginning to be fully considered.

But who exactly is behind one of the biggest information leaks in history? To this day, the identity of the leaker remains unknown but this doesn’t mean the voice of John Doe has been silent. On May 6th, the ICIJ released an 1,800 word statement entitled ‘The Revolution Will Be Digitized” in which Doe explains his reasons for the leak and the need for his identity to remain concealed. Using the case of Edward Snowden who still finds himself stranded in Moscow as an example, the John Doe reminds us why his true name remains hidden, “I have watched as one after another, whistleblowers and activists in the United States and Europe have had their lives destroyed by the circumstances they find themselves in after shining a light on obvious wrongdoing. (…) Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop.”. In fact, John Doe does have a point; despite his documents unequivocally proving the criminal wrongdoing of many important and powerful world figures, those who expose such crimes in our technology-aged society end up becoming themselves the target of persecution over those whose illegality has been exposed. The fear, for Doe, is not only the risks posed by those who may have a problem with his revelations but most importantly the fear of government retribution. Directly and indirectly, John Doe and his leak of the Panama Papers have revealed and highlighted many of our societal hypocrisies and the inequalities of our global capitalist system. When it is the exposer of the crimes, and not those who have perpetrated them, that are targeted for their actions and constructed through media channels as “anti-nationalists” or “traitors”, we clearly have a big problem.

Perhaps what is more important to consider than John Doe’s true identity are the reasons for which he leaked such a vast array of Mossak Fonseca’s ‘dirty secrets’ and what these documents say about the way our global capitalist economy functions. In the introduction to his statement, Doe states income inequality, which he considers “the defining issue of our time”, as the main reason for which he chose to hand-over the documents to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (which later handed them to the ICIJ). The leak is in fact an attack on a Capitalist system in which there is an extreme imbalance between those few that prosper and the many that struggle. From the perspective of income and tax, Mossacka Fonseca’s dubious practices reveal a world in which lack of fiscal responsibility and tax avoidance are privileges that can be purchased and arranged if one has the right means. The leak is an attack (or perhaps an insight) into the system of Capitalism’s inherent hypocrisy. Take for example a country like the United Kingdom, where the current conservative government has gone through a series of anti-austerity measures like the privatisation of the NHS (UK’s free health service) and cutting funding for a range of benefits such as for disabilities in efforts to boost the national economy. Yet it seems that most of these measures have affected mainly Britain’s working and lower-middle classes and those whose wealth could most contribute to an anti-austerity program have been able to avoid that very responsibility through the use of secretive offshore companies to hide their money. As the Panama Papers revealed, Britain is actually the second most prominent country where the Mossack Fonseca’s middle men operate with 1,924 identified firms and 32,682 active intermediaries in the UK. The Prime Minister David Cameron was himself involved when it was revealed that his father had used the Panamanian law firm to shield his investment fund (of which Cameron had at a time owned a large share of) from UK taxation. Regardless of whether David Cameron himself has played a direct role in tax evasion, a problem he has persistently - and perhaps hypocritically- spoken against, it is clear that capitalist corruption and income inequality is most often not caused by the powerful people at the top. It is perhaps the very same wealthy conservatives who will blame migrants or working-class people for ‘ruining their economies’ by taking advantage of government benefits that themselves are exploiting the system for their favourable interest. As John Doe himself states, “Democratic governance depends upon responsible individuals throughout the entire system who understand and uphold the law, not who understand and exploit it”. For John Doe, and perhaps many others, the Panama Papers represent the beginning of a digitised revolution against the fast-paced and all-invasive corruption of the Capitalist system.

Whether the Panama Papers will lead to a complete societal upheaval of the current system still remains to be seen, but that is not to say that the global financial and political sphere has not started to feel the leak’s consequences. As stated before, Iceland’s Prime Minister has resigned from his powerful position but this was not the only influential client to suffer important accusations and many more implications of the documents still continue to be analysed and understood.What is clear from the release of these papers is there is something definitely wrong with our capitalist global economy and those at the top have used clever ways to exploit its faults to their greedy benefit. Enough blaming the “undocumented migrants” for the collapse of economies and let’s start facing the real culprits, the wolves who hide behind the legality of their suits and powerful positions.

To learn more about the papers, visit the ICIJ's official website on the subject here.

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