Tag Archives: Panama

Lebanon Disaster Update: An Excellent and Disturbing OCCRP Report Sheds New Light on the Backstory of the Deadly Explosion

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A couple of weeks ago, I did a short post in reaction to the deadly warehouse explosion in Beirut, which killed at least 182 people, wounded thousands, and left hundreds of thousands homeless. My post wasn’t really about the Lebanon blast per se—especially because the causes of the explosion, and the role that corruption may have played, were unclear—but rather discussed more generally the direct and indirect ways that widespread corruption can increase the risk of deadly accidents. But I continue to wonder whether, with respect to the Beirut tragedy, it will turn out that corruption (rather than “mere” incompetence) will have been a contributing cause.

We still don’t have all the answers—particularly with respect to the decision-making process within Lebanon itself—but thanks to excellent investigative reporting by an international team of journalists with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), we now have a great deal more information about the shadowy and highly suspicious backstory of the abandoned ship that brought the ammonium nitrate to Beirut in the first place. I don’t think I can do the report justice, but I highly recommend that everyone read it—it’s available here. And to give you a sense of what’s in it, I’ll just quote the main findings summarized at the beginning of the report: Continue reading →

The FCPA Is Not an All-Purpose Anti-Foreign-Illegality Law

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A few months back, Adam Davidson did a terrific New Yorker piece on the Trump Organization’s shady business dealings in Azerbaijan, focusing on evidence of corruption, money laundering, and sanctions evasion in connection with the Trump Organization’s licensing deal for a Trump Tower in Baku, the country’s capital. While I greatly admired the piece, I nonetheless criticized one aspect of it: the argument that the Trump Organization’s licensing deal ran afoul of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), an allegation which, it seemed to me, wasn’t adequately supported by the otherwise impressive body of evidence assembled in the piece. While I recognize that a piece written for a general audience can’t get too lost in the technical legal weeds, I do think that it’s important to convey an accurate sense of what the FCPA does, and what it doesn’t do.

I was reminded of this a couple weeks back when I read an otherwise incisive essay by the political commentator Heather Digby Parton (whose work I very much admire) on Ivanka Trump’s shady business dealings and possible legal violations. Though Ms. Parton’s piece focused mainly on the Trump Ocean Club in Panama (dubbed “Narco-a-Lago” in an excellent Global Witness report), she also brought up Mr. Davidson’s reporting on the Azerbaijan project, and repeated the suggestion that the Trump Organization’s involvement in this project likely violated the FCPA. In making this case, Ms. Parton states:

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act requires that American companies not make profits from illegal activities overseas, and simply saying you didn’t know where the money was coming from isn’t good enough…. Courts have held that a company needn’t be aware of specific criminal behavior but only that corruption was pervasive.

I hate to be nitpicky, especially when it involves criticizing a piece I generally agree with by an author I admire, but this is simply not a correct statement of the law. Continue reading →

Will the Panama Papers Lead to Criminal Prosecutions?

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“[T]housands of prosecutions could stem from the Panama Papers, if only law enforcement could access and evaluate the actual documents. [But] ICIJ and its partner publications have rightly stated that they will not provide them to law enforcement agencies.”

Manifesto of “John Doe,” the Panama Papers leaker, May 6, 2016

Is Mr. Doe correct?  Will thousands of tax cheats, corrupt politicians and other crooks get off scot free because prosecutors, anticorruption commissions, tax and customs authorities, and other law enforcement agencies can’t obtain the documents that constitute the Panama Papers?

This is surely a possibility.  In some countries the stories written on the Panama Papers do not identify who used the services of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca to establish a corporation in the British Virgin Islands, Nevada, or other offshore jurisdiction.  The rules governing the opening of a criminal investigation in most countries are (with very good reason) quite stringent, and without knowing who actually opened an offshore corporation the authorities in some countries will be powerless to proceed.  Even in those countries where the owners of offshore corporations have been revealed, that may not be enough for a criminal investigation.  As Mossack Fonseca and its defenders have reminded the public (ad nauseam), owning a corporation in another country is not by itself illegal.

One tact authorities in these countries could take would be to focus on the law firms, banks, and other entities in their countries that introduced their nationals to Mossack Fonseca.  As explained in earlier posts (here, here and here), these “introducers” are the critical link in the chain of transactions that starts with a tax evader or corrupt politician’s need to hide money and ends with his or her ownership of an offshore corporation that cannot be traced to them. Moreover, not only are the introducers the critical link; they are the vulnerable link as well. Continue reading →

Guest Post: After the Media Circus, What (If Anything) Have We Learned from the Panama Papers?

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GAB is pleased to welcome back Professor Jason Sharman, Deputy Director of the Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University, Australia, who contributes the following guest post:

After the initial flurry of media attention to the Panama Papers, Matthew Stephenson rightly asks how much, if anything, we have really learned from this affair beyond the celebrity gossip.

A notable degree of modesty is in order here, as what we have seen so far is a tiny, almost certainly unrepresentative sample of the vast quantity of information leaked to International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The initial wave of media coverage related to 140 individuals, including 12 heads of state or government. Since the ICIJ database became searchable on May 9th, we have a few more names, mostly small-time crooks, and it is possible to run individual name searches to your heart’s content. Nevertheless, given that Mossack Fonseca had created 214,000 shell companies, what we have seems to be less than 1% of their clientele, and presumably the most sensational and outrageous cases. If you looked at your average big international bank, took the records of 214,000 accounts, and subjected them to a detailed financial audit, you probably would find at least a few hundred people engaged in crime or some other seriously shady business (putting banks’ own criminal conspiracies like rigging the LIBOR and Forex markets and sanctions-busting to one side).

Matthew’s earlier post asked about the structure of the offshore shell company industry–in particular, whether it was dominated by a few major providers, or whether it was a highly fragmented market with many firms, each with small market share. The answer is both: There are a few big wholesalers of shell companies, four or five, plus a couple in the US. The wholesalers sell to thousands of intermediary retailers, who then sell to the end-users, i.e. the beneficial owners. I was surprised by how many retailers Mossack Fonseca dealt with (14,000), given that the other wholesalers of equivalent size engage with 2,000-3,000 intermediaries. The difficulty keeping track of this number of retailers, let alone their customers, might explain Mossack Fonseca’s otherwise-puzzling suicidal indiscretion in transacting with customers who brought a huge amount of risk for a fairly trivial sum of money, e.g. those on US government sanctions lists.

What does the structure of the industry mean for regulatory solutions? The retailers could take up the slack if the wholesalers were put out of business, although the process of forming shell companies would be less efficient and more expensive. More importantly, the more concentrated the industry, the easier it is to regulate, compared to the whack-a-mole situation of thousands of independent retailers. As Rick Messick rightly points out, for this regulation to work, however, it is necessary for the Eligible Introducer system between wholesalers and retailers to work in identifying beneficial owners. Despite a litany of earlier high-profile failures, a Guardian piece actually suggests that the British Virgin Islands authorities had recently got on top of this problem: in 2015, 90 requests from the local Financial Intelligence Unit to Mossack Fonseca turned up the names of 89 beneficial owners. However, because customer identity documents are now almost always scans rather than paper, there seems to be no good reason why they can’t be held in the jurisdiction of incorporation.

More broadly, with the Panama Papers and the earlier April 2013 offshore leak, we (or at least the ICIJ) now have information on just over 320,000 offshore shell companies, which probably represents something like 15-20% of all the offshore shell companies ever created. You can work out the total number in that BVI has about 40-45% of the worldwide market. It currently has 450,000 active companies, and 950,000 formed in total since the creation of its registry. If we could draw a random sample of these companies and the associated documentation, rather than cherry-picking the worst of the worst, then we could form a much more accurate and robust conclusion on what the typical uses of offshore shell companies actually are.

In just looking at the information we do have from the Panama Papers, two things are fairly apparent, yet don’t seem to have attracted much comment so far: Continue reading →

Not the “Panama Papers” But the “BVI Papers” or Better Still the “EI” Papers

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The immense public service performed by the consortia of journalists who exposed the inner-workings of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca is plain to all.  The thousands of stories in multiple languages revealing how M/F works with law firms and banks around the globe to help individuals hide their wealth has provided law enforcement a cornucopia of leads — as the investigations launched in France, Switzerland, South Africa, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, El Salvador, Argentina, and India attest to.  Far more important than nailing a few tax cheats or crooked politicians, though, are the revelations showing how easily firms like M/F can dodge laws that supposedly bar them from helping individuals keep their wealth a secret and what changes are needed to end this legal dodge ball.

But there is a risk that, because the revelations have been dubbed the “Panama Papers,” reformers will be thrown off the scent.  Panama is a small part of the story at best.  The real problem lies in jurisdictions like the British Virgin Islands where, as an April 4 Guardian story shows, an obscure provision in its antimoney laundering law allows M/F and other firms like it to establish a BVI corporation without having to verify who the true, or beneficial, owner of the corporation will be.  This creates an opportunity to introduce a layer of secrecy between the owner and his or her money and law enforcement authorities.  A name better calculated to lead reformers in the right direction would have been the “BVI Papers” since most of the corporations M/F establishes for clients are created under the law of BVI.

An even better name still might be the “EI Papers” as it is the “EI” provision of BVI law that allows M/F to duck verifying the identity of the beneficial owners of the corporations it creates.  “EI” stands for “eligible introducer,” and the best way to see how the EI provision in BVI law makes hiding money so easy is through an example.  Suppose, just for the sake of illustration, Russian President Vladimir Putin was about to come into a large amount of rubles that he would rather Russian citizens and his critics abroad not know about.  How would the EI provision in BVI law help him keep his wealth secret? Continue reading →