Panama Papers Study Questions Set #3 [pg 176-243] 1. Who is Christoph Zollinger
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Question
Panama Papers Study Questions Set #3 [pg 176-243]
1. Who is Christoph Zollinger and how does he engage in legal hair-splitting?
2. How does British author Nicholas Shaxson describe the offshore industry?
3. Why did Joseph Kabila approve the deal with Caprikat and Foxwhelp even though they underbid the contract?
4. What naedoes Jean Ziegler apply to the offshore underworld and what does he say its impact is on the developing world?
5. What is the paradox of plenty and what did US economist Jeffrey Sachs observe about it?
6. Who is Edmund W. and why is his service to Mossack Fonseca so important?
7. Who is Andrew M. and why does his case suggest that Mossack Fonseca's verification process of who they were doing business with was lax?
8. Why is Chinese president Xi Jingping's rhetoric about transparency apparently ineffective at best and hypocritical at worst?
9. What is particularly scandalous about the timing of Petro Poroshenko's establishment of Prime Asset Partners Ltd.?
10. What allusion did the authors have in mind when they used the term "The Panama Papers"?
Explanation / Answer
1) Christoph Heinrich Zollinger wasborn on October 14, 1939 is a Swiss publicist , social critic and local politician.
2) Nick Shaxson, author of ‘Treasure Islands: tax havens and the men who stole the world’ There are a couple of main conclusions. One is that the offshore system of tax havens is much much bigger and much more central to the global economy than almost anybody had thought. It’s seen in the popular imagination as an exotic sideshow to the global economy. But really since the era of globalisation began in the 1970s the offshore system of tax havens has been growing much much faster than the supposedly onshore economy. It has been steadily pushing its way onshore so that a lot of big countries are increasingly resembling tax havens as they try and compete with each other to attract the hot money. So they increasingly offer stronger forms of secrecy and new forms of trust and corporations and so on to try and attract the hot money, and new tax loopholes.
5) The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty, refers to the paradox that countries with an abundance of natural resources (like fossil fuels and certain minerals), tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. There are many theories and much academic debate about the reasons for and exceptions to these adverse outcomes. Most experts believe the resource curse is not universal or inevitable, but affects certain types of countries or regions under certain conditions
10) The Panama Papers are 11.5 million leaked documents that detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 offshore entities. The documents, some dating back to the 1970s, were created by, and taken from, Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider Mossack Fonseca, and were leaked in 2015 by an anonymous source.
The documents contain personal financial information about wealthy individuals and public officials that had previously been kept private. While offshore business entities are legal, reporters found that some of the Mossack Fonseca shell corporations were used for illegal purposes, including fraud, tax evasion, and evading international sanctions.
"John Doe", the whistleblower who leaked the documents to German journalist Bastian Obermayer from the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), remains anonymous, even to the journalists who worked on the investigation. "My life is in danger", he told them. In a May 6 statement, John Doe cited income inequality as the reason for his action, and said he leaked the documents "simply because I understood enough about their contents to realise the scale of the injustices they described". He added that he had never worked for any government or intelligence agency and expressed willingness to help prosecutors if granted immunity from prosecution. After SZ verified that the statement did in fact come from the source for the Panama Papers, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) posted the full document on its website.
SZ asked the ICIJ for help because of the amount of data involved. Journalists from 107 media organizations in 80 countries analyzed documents detailing the operations of the law firm. After more than a year of analysis, the first news stories were published on April 3, 2016, along with 150 of the documents themselves.The project represents an important milestone in the use of data journalism software tools and mobile collaboration.
The documents were dubbed the Panama Papers because of the country they were leaked from; however, the Panamanian government expressed strong objections to the name, as did other entities in Panama and elsewhere. Some media outlets covering the story have used the name "Mossack Fonseca papers
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