Panama Papers

[David Guyatt]

The group of so called "independent" journalists who broke the Panama Papers story, the ICIJ, have announced they now publishing a searchable database of over 200,00 offshore accounts - but they, in their wisdom, have decided not to make public "the totality of the leak" and is keeping to itself "raw data" and will not make available "personal information en masse".

How very considerate of them to the sensitivities of the untold number of wealthy tax evaders from around the world.

Anyway, you can read their latest unctuous drivel HERE.

Meanwhile, following earlier discussions about Mossack Fonseka's nazi connection there is a story in the Guardian about how MS had a role in fight over a Modigliani painting stolen by the nazis and which is now in private hands. I am quite strongly reminded of the stories published last year about Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of a Nazi who had a vast cache of stolen artworks valued well over $1 billion, that were carried elsewhere on this forum HERE and HERE. And I do wonder if the unnamed seller of the Modigliani in the Mossack Fonseca's story is the same Herr Gurlitt?

[David Guyatt]

William Engdahl has also arrived at the conclusion we at DPF reached some while ago about the reason for the leak of the Panama Papers, namely to drive hot money/drug money to the US to be used to bolster a currency (the US dollar) that is in its last days.

Call me silly, but I am inclined to link this article with the two article I posted earlier today by Thierry Meyssan on the SWIFT clearing system and the background for the wars in Syria and Ukraine and the new Silk Road. I believe all three article reveal the actual US strategy to curtail China and Russia by forcing them to bow to US demands and to bring a halt to the falling off the precipice that the US is now facing should these strategies not work.

What is obvious to me is that the US is now really scraping the bottom of the barrel in an attempt to survive and maintain its hegemony and control - and this tells me that it is ultimately doomed to failure. Greed and the illness of arrogance has doomed them.

From William Engdahl:

From Golden Dollar to Petro Dollar to Narco Dollar

Column: Economics
Region: USA in the World



The role as world reserve currency is something no financial hegemon in history has willingly surrendered. It took two world wars for the City of London and Bank of England to reluctantly concede hegemony of the Pound Sterling to the Dollar. As Henry Kissinger is said to have remarked decades ago, "If you control the money, you can control the entire world." Whether or not Kissinger ever said that publicly, he and his patron, David Rockefeller, certainly believed it. Now, with US government debt shooting past $19 trillion and the true state of the American economy and its infrastructure at its worst since the Great Depression, with most Americans living on the brink of financial disaster, the brilliant financial engineers of Wall Street and Washington have once again come up with a scheme to prolong the role of Dollar as King in the world economy. The recent Panama Papers revelations by a select group of Western mainstream media including the New York Times, BBC and Süddeutsche Zeitung, were notable as a brazen attempt to attack foreign leaders such as Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping for alleged corruption. Notably, the leaked files of the Panama law firm, Mossack Fonseca, so far have failed to leak even one significant name of a US citizen hiding money in offshore accounts of the Panama facilitators.While the world's eyes were on the identities of alleged offshore money holders, they failed to consider the longer-term consequence of the huge revelations. The one country so far to benefit from the Panama Papers revelations is the country that is rapidly becoming the new "Panama" or better, the new Switzerland, namely the United States of America, the initiator of attacks on other hot money havens offshore over the past two decades.

Golden Dollar Era

Over the past seventy two years ever since the US and select wartime allied governments met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944 to decide the shape of the postwar monetary order, the US dollar has reigned supreme in the world economy. By end of the War in 1945 the US Federal Reserve held the overwhelming bulk of world monetary gold.As war erupted in Europe in September 1939 with Hitler's and Stalin's dismemberment of Poland, European gold was flooding into the United States. In 1935 US official gold reserves had been valued at just over $9 billion. By 1940 after the onset of war in Europe, they had risen to $20 billion. As desperate European countries sought to finance their war effort, their gold went to the United States to purchase essential goods. By the time of the June 1944 convening of the international monetary conference at Bretton Woods, the United States controlled fully 70% of the world's monetary gold, an impressive advantage. That 70% did not even include calculating the captured gold of the defeated Axis powers of Germany or Japan, where exact facts and data were buried in layers of deception and rumor.For the following quarter century, the gold-backed US dollar reigned supreme as the rest of the world, especially war-ravaged Western Europe, scrambled to find dollars to pay US imported goods to rebuild their industrial base. The dollar was literally "as good as good," much as the Pound Sterling had been a century earlier.Yet by the end of the 1960's the dollar world had undergone significant change. The economies of France and especially of West Germany had emerged with a new state-of-the-art industrial base and was rapidly becoming an export power challenging American obsolescent industrial goods. The US industrial base had last undergone substantial modernization some three decades before. Europe and later Japan, were posing a competitive challenge to US industry. More alarming for Wall Street banks like David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, Citibank or JPMorgan, as US trade dollar earnings of German companies like Mercedes, VW or BMW or Siemens were accumulating in the coffers of the German Bundesbank or Bank of France during the 1960's an alarming change in policy emerged.French President Charles de Gaulle, acting on advice of his conservative financial adviser, Jacques Rueff, ordered the Bank of France to begin to redeem its rapidly accumulating trade surplus dollars for gold, something then legal under the rules of Bretton Woods. The conservative German Bundesbank followed in demanding US gold for dollars. In 1968 in one of the first crude versions of their Color Revolutions, the CIA and US State Department toppled President de Gaulle in the events known as the May 1968 student revolt. Despite the replacement of de Gaulle by former Rothschild banker, Georges Pompidou, the foreign demand for Federal Reserve gold redemptions increased as Washington budget deficits to finance the ill-conceived Vietnam War exploded.By August 1971, President Nixon was advised by his Assistant Treasury secretary, Paul Volcker, a former executive at Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank, to essentially tear up the Bretton Woods Treaty and declare the US dollar a free-floating paper no longer redeemable in gold. The Federal Reserve's gold reserves over the previous several years had been drained by foreign central banks fearful of the import of US dollar inflation as Washington refused pleas to devalue the dollar to re-stabilize the system. Rueff and France were calling for a 100% dollar devaluation against the Franc or Deutschmark.

Petrodollar era is born

By 1973, in developments I describe in detail in my book, A Century of War, as well as in Myths, Lies & Oil Wars, Wall Street and the Federal Reserve "solved" the problem of a dollar in free-fallit had devalued some 40% against the Franc, D-mark and Yen after August, 1971by orchestrating, with the skillful and deceitful diplomacy of then-Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, an OPEC oil price embargo following outbreak of the October, 1973 Yom Kippur War. By early 1974 the price of OPEC oil had been set some 400% above that of 1971. The dollar value soared against other major currencies as Germany, France and the rest of the oil-hungry world scrambled to find 400% more dollars to import their oil. Kissinger at the time wrote about "recycling petrodollars." The dollar would be backed, not by gold, but by oil.To be certain that the petrodollar system held, and that OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, would never be tempted to sell for D-marks, Francs or Yen as those countries tried, Washington took special measures. On June 8 1974, US Secretary of StateHenry Kissinger signed an agreement establishing a US-Saudi Arabian Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation. Its official mandate was co-operation in the field of finance."By December 1974 the US Treasury had signed an agreement in Riyadh with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, whose mission was, "to establish a new relationship through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with the (US) Treasury borrowing operation. Under this arrangement, SAMA will purchase new US Treasury securities with maturities of at least one year," explained Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Jack F. Bennett, later to become a director of Exxon. Wall Street banker, David Mulford of Credit Suisse-FirstBoston was sent by Washington to SAMA in to seal the deal.Bennett's memo was addressed to Secretary of State Kissinger, dated February 1975, explaining the arrangements agreed two months before. As part of the secret agreements between Washington and Riyadh negotiated by Bennett, Saudi Arabia, in return for generous US defense equipment purchases and guarantees of its military security, agreed that OPEC would accept only US dollars for their oil, not German Marks despite their clear value, not Japanese Yen nor French Francs or even Swiss Francs, but only American dollars.That was the essence of the petrodollar system which over the past decade or more has been eroding as Russia, China, Iran and even the EU challenge the role of the dollar as reserve currency. Russia and China, in a defensive move have agreed to energy trade for oil and gas paid not in dollars but in own currencies. Iran recently announced it will accept only Euros for its oil. More and more the days of the dollar demise are being proclaimed.

A new Narco-dollar system?

Now, however, it appears the financial wizards of Wall Street and the US Treasury have come up with a new life-extension idea.In what must be termed at least a clever attempt to solve the looming crisis of the dollar, a new role of the dollar is emerging from the rubble of the offshore banking crisis triggered by the suspicious hacking of the Panama Papers. The under-regulated United States is rapidly becoming the "new Switzerland" in attracting "hot money" which includes everything from narco dollars from the international drug traffic to hiding of funds offshore by corrupt politicians.For the past decade or more the US Government and revenue agency have pressured discreet offshore banking centers from Switzerland to the Cayman Islands to British Virgin Islands and beyond allegedly to clamp down on US tax-evading citizens hiding money abroad from the IRS or terrorists moving money to finance Al Qaeda and the likes. But the US government itself has rigidly refused to abide by the new international money reporting rules it caused to be created.Now, according to a January report in the Bloomberg financial magazine, the result is that the United States itself, in places like Reno, Nevada or South Dakota or Wyoming, are fast becoming the "new Switzerland" hot or secret money havens.Bloomberg quotes a Zurich attorney, Peter A. Cotorceanu, a lawyer at Anaford AG, "The USA, which has been so sanctimonious in its condemnation of Swiss banks, has become the banking secrecy jurisdiction du jour…That giant sucking sound' you hear? It is the sound of money rushing to the USA."The attraction of secrecy havens inside the US comes from the fact that a very strict money reporting standard set out by the Paris-Based OECD in 2014 has not been signed by four countries: Bahrain, Nauru, Vanuatuand, guess who…the United States.In the last months, taking advantage of the Washington hypocrisy, some of the world's largest private banking managers including Rothschild Trust North America LLC. based in Reno, Nevada. Geneva-based Cisa Trust Co. SA, which advises wealthy Latin Americans, is applying to open in Pierre, South Dakota to "serve the needs of our foreign clients," said John J. Ryan Jr., Cisa's president.Trident Trust Co., one of the world's biggest providers of offshore trusts, moved dozens of accounts out of Switzerland, Grand Cayman, and other locales and into Sioux Falls, South Dakota in December, ahead of a January 1 disclosure deadline. Commenting on the new phenomenon, Andrew Penney of Rothschild & Co. stated that the US "is effectively the biggest tax haven in the world."Making the process even more positive for the dollar, a 2010 USA law, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, requires financial firms to disclose foreign accounts held by US citizens and report them to the IRS or face steep penalties. With the US refusing to sign the OECD disclosure rules, US offshore dollars are also flooding back into Reno and other new US banking secrecy havens.Further, to make other offshore banking centers unattractive, a law implemented in 2011 requires Panama-registered agents to provide client information when requested on all new incorporations, and the British Virgin Islands has adopted restrictions on due diligence. In an investors' conference recently in San Francisco, Rothschild's Penney stated in remarks cut from the published version of his remarks, that the US Government lacks "the resources to enforce foreign tax laws and has little appetite to do so." ixNow with one of the largest international offshore money facilitators, Panama's Mossack Fonseca, admitting it is being forced to wind down, the way is clear to make the USA the new Switzerland or Panama. Drug cartels of the world are already clearly informed and a good share of the estimated $1.6 trillion of criminal funds annually are searching new safe havens in Reno and other US hot money havens. From a golden dollar to a petro dollar to now a narco dollar. It's pretty pathetic for the country that was once the world's leading industrial technology leader.
http://journal-neo.org/2016/05/09/from-g...co-dollar/

[Tracy Riddle]

I was re-reading Webster Tarpley's Synthetic Terror (3rd or 4th time, it's got so much in it to digest), and he spends a lot of time talking about the constant near-meltdowns of the dollar and the world financial system since the 1970s. He reminds us that the 1990s were not a decade of peace and prosperity like we tend to think.

[David Guyatt]

From WhoWhatWhy:

INVESTIGATING THE INVESTIGATORS: THE PANAMA PAPERS

Newsstand in Bulgaria Photo credit: David / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Strong evidence has emerged that in at least one case that of Bulgaria the investigation into the critical Panama Papers files may have been placed in the wrong hands.
And since the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which is responsible for the vetting process, has failed to respond to repeated queries by WhoWhatWhy and other journalists, only the future will show whether this case is isolated or an example of a systemic problem.
It is hard to overstate the significance of the Panama Papers investigation, which has so far cost the seat of at least one prime minister (that of Iceland) and triggered investigations of many other public figures across the globe.
It involves one of the biggest data leaks in history, of some 11.5 million documents related to decades of potentially questionable offshore financial activities by wealthy international clients of the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca & Co.
Who Blew the Whistle?
Countless speculations have flooded the internet about the identity of the anonymous whistleblower who sent the approximately 2.6 terabyte trove of information to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung in early 2015: though several high-ranking Russians have been mentioned in the leaks, leading Russian media to cry Western conspiracy, there are also those well-placed Western analysts who believe the Kremlin itself was seeking to blackmail its Western counterparts.
This makes it all the more important that the leaked documents are properly investigated and has contributed to mounting criticism of ICIJ, which vets the journalists and media who are allowed to access the files pertaining to each country, and has adopted an exclusive trickle-down approach to the investigation.
Both journalists and governments eager to expose potential tax evaders and other white-collar criminals have complained. Some have even accused ICIJ of "censoring" the leak.
"If you censor more than 99% of the documents you are engaged in 1% journalism by definition," tweeted Wikileaks.
ICIJ has countered that journalistic ethics oblige them to protect the privacy of the source and of the many innocent people whose sensitive data may also be included in the leak. They have sought to reassure the public that they are doing their best to investigate every case of wrongdoing in the most ethical and thorough way possible.
ICIJ Stays Silent
But WhoWhatWhy's questions about the way ICIJ have handled the Bulgaria investigations were met with silence by the consortium.
Prominent Bulgarian investigative journalists say it's not the first time.
"I confronted ICIJ during their presentation at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Lillehammer last October and publicly told them that in the case of Bulgaria, they gave [exclusive] access to the Swiss Leaks files to a former state security agent and a newspaper linked to the Bulgarian mafia," said Atanas Tchobanov (alternatively spelled: Chobanov), the editor-in-chief of the maverick investigative reporting outlet Bivol, which has a partnership agreement with Wikileaks and has broken a number of stories over the past few years that mainstream Bulgarian media wouldn't touch.
"ICIJ has been ignoring us ever since, though we also alerted them that they were making the same mistake with the Panama Papers leak. Though our application for access to the files was backed by OCCRP, [ICIJ]rejected us, claiming they already had a partner in Bulgaria."
We were unable to substantiate Tchobanov's allegation that 24 Chasa, one of the largest circulation dailies in Bulgaria, is linked to the local mafia. The newspaper's editor-in-chief, Borislav Zumbulev, dismissed the criticism in an email as a case of "professional envy." (Bivol has a long history of run-ins with mainstream Bulgarian media.) In a separate article defending their journalist's past record, which he forwarded (in Bulgarian), Zumbulev also claimed that "anybody [with the right qualifications] can be in that consortium [ICIJ]" contradicting not only Bivol, but also countless other journalists around the globe.
But WhoWhatWhy examined a number of documents provided by Bivol to back their claim, and we found enough to raise major red flags about allowing the newspaper to be the single gatekeeper to such important information.
St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria
Photo credit: Dennis Jarvis / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Firstly, in the way of background: Bulgaria is widely perceived as the poorest and most corrupt country in the EU, whose media are ranked by Reporters Without Borders as the least free in the union (and just marginally better than those of Zambia and The Republic of the Congo).
This is colorfully reflected in 24 Chasa's recent past: its previous German owners left in 2010 citing "collusion between governments and oligarchs." The interim owners were reportedly charged with money laundering.
And we have seen documents alongside multiple media reports (in Bulgarian) indicating that the current owners are heavily indebted to Investbank, a bank named as a "bad apple" in a Wiki-leaked US diplomatic cable from 2006.
"Nothing has changed since then," said Tchobanov, even though the bank has categorically denied these allegations in a public exchange with Bivol. In 2015, the respected Bulgarian daily Capital reported irregularities in the bank's recent audits (in Bulgarian).
Paid Advertorial Raises Questions
Perhaps the most damning recent episode concerning 24 Chasa took place in 2014, when it published an unmarked advertorial framed as an interview attacking civil society organizations that had accused the then-fourth-largest lender in Bulgaria of corruption and malpractice.
Just months later the bank in question, Corporate Commercial Bank (also named as a "bad apple" in the same leaked cable from 2006), went bankrupt, and its owner was charged with financial crimes. He is currently fighting extradition proceedings in Serbia, where he went into hiding. Though a Sofia court ruled earlier this year that 24 Chasa was not guilty of slander, the civil society organizations in question have vowed to appeal the decision moreover, they published a written court deposition by the newspaper confirming that the item was indeed paid content that had been commissioned and approved by the bank (in Bulgarian).
In Tchobanov's words, "If they took money to break the code of ethics once by publishing unmarked attack ads what is to guarantee that they won't take money to hide information, to manipulate it, or to trade with it?"
Zumbulev countered that "half" of the allegations listed above were "slander" by the time this article was published, he had not responded to a follow-up question asking him to specify which half.
The Specter of the Former Communist Secret Police
WhoWhatWhy was also able to verify that, out of two partners ICIJ listed in Bulgaria Alexenia Dimitrova and Stanimir Kumurdjiev, who are both working for the same media only Dimitrova has access to the Panama Papers files.
Moreover, just as Tchobanov claims, Dimitrova is a confirmed agent of the former communist state security services. Nonetheless, that was over a quarter of a century ago and cannot be held as proof of any current wrongdoing.
"When [her file as a state security agent was made public] Alexenia came to me and tendered her resignation," wrote Zumbulev in the article defending her. "We didn't accept it because we know her for 25 years and there is nothing in her work that suggests [suspicious influences]." Zumbulev also claimed that Dimitrova's father had been persecuted by the communist regime and that he saw her as a victim rather than a victimizer.
Yet this episode is significant, if only as something that justifies broader access to the files, since those state security services are widely believed to have spawned much of the mafia whose activities would presumably show up in the documents. Hardly a controversial allegation, as many in the country have called for it to become part of the history books.
All of this is sufficient, at the very least, to raise major questions about ICIJ's approach toward the investigation. The leaked documents stand to lose much of their value if they are placed in the hands of people who may have an agenda beyond disclosing them.

[Tobias Zackrisson]

CIA linked firm 'Fosun' appears in panama papers database along with Its CEO 'Guo Guangchang'[URL="https://www.reddit.com/r/PanamaPapers/comments/5010sx/cia_linked_firm_fosun_appears_in_panama_papers/"]
[/URL]
From Newsweek

'A Chinese Billionaire With High-Level Communist Party Connections Now Heads An Insurance Company That Has Long Catered To Senior CIA Officers'

ICIJ Database Link:
https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/10113909
Opencorporates:
https://opencorporates.com/companies/hk/F0016964
Forbes Profile:
http://www.forbes.com/profile/guo-guangchang/
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guo_Guangchang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosun