In a longer segment, I would have talked abt other issues arising from the #PandoraPapers 🧵. ICIJ's work is remarkable. As someone who spends time w descriptions of obfuscated legal vehicles for holding assets, I assure you their reconstruction of stories is a major feat. But:
https://twitter.com/vanessahistory/status/1445394075763580935
The focus on personalities, while certainly necessary in some part to get people interested and talking, obscures other essential points. For one, we need to talk about the enablers-tax lawyers, bankers etc-about the striking similarity of strategies and tactics they adopted...
100 years ago and now. Of course, as one WaPo piece on the Pandora leak describes, the out-of-State NYC lawyer went to Alaska and wrote the trust law that turned A into a trust tax haven, working with legislators to get necessary measures through. In the early 1920s, Zurich...
lawyers went to Zug and other Swiss Cantons to convince legislators to set up a tax haven. A British barrister wrote the trust law that turned the Caymans into a tax haven. Such stories abound. These enablers did much to create tax havens and generate their own demand.
Some enablers are small outfits limited to individual offshore sites. Others are major global law firms doing much other work as well. This article on @bakermckenzie's dirty tax haven business is thus perhaps the most important #Pandoraleaks piece so far: icij.org/investigations…
I'd like to see more such coverage. Several other issues should receive more attention (dubious notions of legality of these activities; consequences of the rich becoming even richer through tax evasion, what it means for politics; etc). I'll do another 🧵 on that tomorrow. End.
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