The thing is, you can be sure the folks with more imaginary posessions than you, also have boatloads more physical posessions than you. You can compare their imaginary part to your own provable riches, but it’s apples and oranges.
Largest leak in history reveals world leaders and businesspeople hiding trillions in offshore havens
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We need to freeze ALL those accounts!
I smell terrorists!
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It’s only one firm.
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Indeed, if you have a good tax lawyer and accountant the good ol’ US of A itself is one of the biggest and best tax havens there is!
And Nevada, and Wyoming, (both of whom have stronger laws protecting ownership from exposure).
I think we’re getting competition going here, one leak goes up and everyone is omg biggest ever and then potential leakers all over are saying -huh, I could leak something bigger than that. I’ll show em.
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I think we’ve reached the end of this book… (spoliers follow!)
Wherein slowly the horrific shit that’s been kept secret is revealed, via a flood of leaks broadcast to the world.
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Does the public disclosure of these documents violate anyone’s civil liberties or human rights (e.g. doxing or violation of attorney-client privilege or generalized privacy right)? Would it matter if it were police breaking into a law office without a warrant and confiscating documents and publishing them? Did they have it coming? Maybe they did. Am I allowed to say that?
Hopefully we can get the servers too…
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Given that the leak was from a relatively long established(not by Swiss banking standards or anything, which isn’t a huge surprise given that ‘Panama’ isn’t really long-established) law firm, there probably is a substantial chunk of scanned paper in there.
Organizations that keep lots of records and predate widespread adoption of computers tend to have some pretty ugly stuff lurking in the legacy archives. (Not that doing so is necessarily unreasonable: a bunch of giant TIFFs are pretty painful to use until they’ve been OCRed; but it’s well known that OCR produces imperfect results(eg. the atrocious Xerox fuckup where a lossy compression algorithm was saving space by identifying and deduplicating ‘visually identical’ characters, occasionally making a mistake in doing so, thus producing output that looked perfect, unlike a super-fuzzy JPEG; but had the wrong letters and/or numbers), so you can’t just OCR it once and throw the original away, you can use OCR to guide the indexing process; but you need the original if an issue comes up or future OCR offers better results, and ‘the original’ in TIFF form is much easier to store than ‘the original’ in paper form.)
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If one could watch the movement of money the way you can watch the movement of aircraft online, I bet there is right now, a veritable supernova of tracelines flying around the world.
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It’s virtually certain that this leak violates quite a few people’s attorney-client privilege: that(aside from the fact that constructing a shady deal just on the right side of ‘legal’ is a specialist skill) is the whole point of retaining a law firm to assist with your dodgy clandestine holdings.
The question isn’t really whether privacy/attorney-client privilege/etc. were violated, they were, that was the whole point of leaking. The answer is ‘yes’ and trying to argue otherwise is largely futile.
The question is whether or not these violations are a bad thing, either because they lead to bad results or because they might have some benefits but trample too dangerously on fundamental principles in providing those benefits. So far, I’m inclined to go with ‘no’ on that one.
Attorney-client privilege, say, is a vital principle in making even remotely fair judicial proceedings possible in a situation(which is most of them in criminal justice, and quite a few in civil court) where someone is totally screwed without the benefit of counsel; but the state or a sophisticated adversary would be in the position to try to co-opt everything that passes between them and their lawyer. It is…much less clear… that attorney-client privilege is a vital principle in the context of “My accountant passed the bar, so you can’t ask him anything.”
Privacy, similarly, is something that I’m not at all eager to see eroded; but it isn’t an absolute and unlimited matter. If, say, not-at-ally-hypothetically your prime minister has substantial clandestine holdings in the same banking sector that just cratered your economy and that he is supposed to have a role in bringing to heel; it’s pretty tricky to argue that any good is served by allowing him to keep that little secret; and it is very arguable that, if you want to be prime minister, you are knowingly agreeing to certain matters relevant to your office becoming public. Doesn’t give the public a principled right to pry into your diaper fetish or shamefully bad taste in music; but an excitingly large potential conflict of interest? Yeah, that seems important.
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That much is certain; you couldn’t really run a global economy without it. The question is more “What percentage of the ‘flights’ are airliners; and what percentage are cocaine planes with exceptionally malleable markings operated by dodgy front companies?”
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The latter is what I was referring to!
Imagine the number of people (seemingly innocuous, but now in a position of power) who knew a little of what the boss / money-guy / person in charge was up to - but hadn’t, couldn’t, connect the dots.
Now they know. And a % of those people are going to turn around and start singing (at least, asking for some cash!)
It’s great.
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I wonder what the delay is. Please tell me it isn’t typing up the long list of names.
If we could just lower taxes on the ultra wealthy, just imagine how good it would be for our home countries!
They’re taking their love on tour because they get such cold treatment at home
Nailed it 
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They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the Common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the Common from the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own.
But leaves the Lords and Ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the Common,
And geese will still a Common lack
‘Til they go and steal it back.
— English folk poem, c. 1764
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I share much of your skepticism RE: “Will the rich and powerful suddenly lose the impunity that helped them amass giant piles of dubious slush money just because we now know that they indeed have such giant piles?”; but I do have to wonder:
Unfortunately, we in the US have a moderately alarming supply of inadequately-hinged individuals with a strong sense of grievance and access to fairly punchy firearms.
Even if there are zero official consequences, is there any likelihood that a leak that puts names and faces to ‘the global financial elite’ might motivate some of these people to stop fulminating about the vague assortment of nefarious plots they blame for their misfortunes and decide to go bag somebody specific? Sure, we have Pinkertons for that; but I wouldn’t want to be on the shit list of the ‘unhinged Americans with a chip on one shoulder and an AR-15 on the other’, even if I had some rentacops on call.
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