Tea at Trianon: The Pandora Papers

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, October 11, 2021

The Pandora Papers

From The Guardian:

Why does nothing get done? The reason is that kleptocrats, tax avoiders and other criminals are not the main users of shell companies. The world’s richest corporations, investment funds and individuals also like to use cheap, efficient and opaque corporate structures to move their wealth seamlessly around the globe; and any attempts to rein in the fraudulent use of shell companies will inevitably cost them money ...

Politicians are perhaps counting on the fact that voters are no longer shocked by these kind of allegations (a friend texted after the Pandora papers stories dropped on Sunday to ask, “Should I care this time?”), and are counting on the complexity of the material to baffle us into silence.

As it stands, we have a choice. We can surrender to that bafflement and do nothing but await the next giant data leak, while trust in our democracy corrodes further. Or we can take the one simple step that would solve this problem once and for all: abolish anonymous companies.

The government does not need to wait for international agreement, it can simply pass legislation that the true owners of companies operating in the UK must declare themselves. This wouldn’t solve all the problems we face. It wouldn’t even solve all the problems highlighted by the Pandora papers. But it would be a very good start. (Read more.)

From Breitbart:

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the group behind the “Panama Papers” leak of financial data five years ago, released a sequel of sorts on Sunday. Dubbed the “Pandora Papers,” the new trove of leaked confidential financial documents suggests dozens of world leaders and hundreds of public officials are stashing large sums of money in hidden bank accounts and secret investment projects.
The Pandora Papers leak includes almost 12 million documents, weighing in at 2.94 terabytes of data, harvested through undisclosed methods from 14 financial services providers. Most of the information was dated between 1996 and 2020, although some older records dating back to the 1970s were included as well.
ICIJ noted that by contrast, the Panama Papers came from a single provider, the Mossack Fonseca law firm, and was only about half as big as the Pandora trove. Some of the same corporate entities exposed in the Panama Papers leak also appear in the Pandora Papers, some of them using new identities or registrations.

The documents “cover a wide range of matters,” from establishing shell companies and trusts to buying luxury goods and planning estates. ICIJ claimed some of the documents are “tied to financial crimes, including money laundering.”

ICIJ said over 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries participated in analyzing the leaked documents, making it the largest journalistic collaboration in history.

The papers name over 330 politicians, plus “celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members and leaders of religious groups around the world.” (Read more.)