Making a
prediction is a great way to be wrong about something, but what the heck; the
Panama Papers will produce widespread revulsion, but limited, widespread reform
because the ruling class doesn’t want there to be any*.
Remember, we’ve already been here with the leak of HSBC Swiss bank account details. HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) got the data in 2010,
identified 1,100 dodgy people out of the c. 7,000 listed who hadn’t paid their taxes and yet 5 years
later, only one tax evader had been prosecuted. EVentually, MPs huffed and they puffed, as they do, did some grandstanding and then ...... no much really, which was as unsurprising as it was disgraceful.
HSBC’s name,
it being the money launderer’s bank of choice, looms large in the
Panama Papers. But, then so do those of other banks including the majority
state owned RBS (via it’s Coutts business). This is not a surprise. As HSBC’s own post-Swiss leak statement made clear - "We
acknowledge that the compliance culture and standards of due diligence in
HSBC's Swiss private bank, as well as the
industry in general, were significantly lower than they are today," - tax evasion was (is?) an industry-wide problem conducted on an industrial scale.
The Panama
Papers provide detailed evidence of this if anyone wants to investigate further
or even demand other banks release the details of thousands of other tax
dodgers with the threat of losing their UK, French, German and/or US banking licences
as an incentive.
Similarly, Mossack
Fonseca is (soon to be was) only the world's fourth-biggest provide of offshore
services, so what about numbers 1, 2 and 3 or even 5? If Mossack Fonseca was at
it, then what were/are they up to?
Except, we
know this won’t happen. Rather than demand banks identified as being dodgy in the Panama Papers release any account details, here it’s already getting
boiled down to a politicised debate about the Prime Minister’s father. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine the US going internationally hardcore
after any other offshore service provider the way it went after FIFA (??) or say Gary MacKinnon because too many rich and powerful people simply don’t want
them to.
The lesson
is simple and backed up by the biggest leak in history, there is one set of
laws and institutions for them, the rich and the powerful, and
another for the rest of us. And they are not the same.
One more wee thing, if the
rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes, then how does trickle-down economics,
that great justification of rampant inequality, work? We appear to live in an
era of wealth hoarders, wealth hiders and tax dodgers, not wealth creators.
* Would be lovely to be wrong, but I doubt it
