http://www.bbc.com/news/live/business-35944255

This is a great place to follow it.

Very important to distinguish between
- money laundering
- legal tax avoidance
- using offshore for practical reasons (e.g. you are actually also investing offshore)

Collectivists don't seem to distinguish between these at all.
The bottom line is that high tax burden and tax laws and policies lead to tax avoidance in the fist place.

Some are heads of states and former and high up political elites so them avoiding taxes while expecting others to patty and not do what they are doing is a big problem. Your point would be better if you are talking specifically about people outside of politics.

not someone who matters. The guy is dead and the story broke a few years ago, this adds a few details at best.

The existence of...(name any law)...leads to people breaking said law. That's not a good argument to change the law.

But you're right that much of what's surfacing was legal (though perhaps breaking the spirit of the law, as in legal via loopholes). Glenn Greenwald, in his recent Intercept piece, argues it's equally newsworthy that such tax evasion is legal.

Plus tax avoidance is legal.

To Glenn it just might be news.

"Tax avoidance is legal" is sort of circular. What makes something tax avoidance instead of tax evasion IS the legality of it.

agreed on politicians

I don't condone illegal tax evasion. I also meant loopholes.
These loopholes should be closed but tax burden also lowered.

Lol, do you work for these guys?

Here is something the pearl clutches worried about the importance of preserving 'legitimate' tax avoidance need to read.

http://waitingfortax.com/2016/04/04/...panama-papers/

This is overly simplistic.

Some avoidance is legal because it isn't yet illegal - so you set up a scheme, run it by tax authorities, they say it's legal now under the rules of that filing period then change the rules to close it. Basically unintended loopholes. Those are pretty rare.

Most avoidance is applying the rules as intended and it is fully accepted by everyone. Some of that may include unintended consequences like how Google, Starbucks and the rest avoided taxes in some of Europe by headquartering in one country that had the best terms but your implication is itself circular - that legal avoidance only exists because it isn't yet illegal.

Most avoidance follows very old rules and won't be stopped any time soon, likely ever. Most countries couldn't get rid of avoidance without a completely different basis for their tax code if they even wanted to.

Did you think people become politicians because they wanted to serve the people or fight for the common good?

This is bs. Tax avoidance is an advancing technology and, at least in the US, where one of the two major parties praises avoiding taxes and promises to disband the IRS, it is more and more aggressively pursued. CVS, Pfizer, anyone? Sure, the billion dollar corps. hire $900/hr lawyers who actually do justify their conduct legally, at least facially, and receive 'no action' letters from the IRS or whatever. This is a massive issue and the US needs to end legal tax evasion (aka tax avoidance) but it will not be able to do so until the modern version of the GOP has been crushed into dust.

The Panama shell company thing is distinct, however. If you open a Panamanian shell company, 90% of the time you are doing evasion or illegal activity, not avoidance. See blog post above. It is not public US companies who open such accounts, it is dictators, corrupt officials, and private business owners.

First thing that needs to happen here is for the Brits to kill their tax havens, as they are among the most popular. We can start mopping up the rest after that.

OK, so like, overt claims and arguments specifically calling for specific actions? Cool. Not sure what that has to do with this Ickean problem-reaction-solution crystal-ball-gazing in a story that doesn't even seem directly concerned with cash per se.

Well cash is already government-issued, so I'm not really seeing your point. All the transactions are already tracked by somebody, hence the breaking of the story.

But to answer your question, what I'm talking about is the paranoid and magical thinking implied by your Straussian 'reading' of what is, like, a semi-random event into part of an orchestrated effort by the lizardmen to come for our Benjamins. It's three parts crazy to one part dumb, which is more or less what the 'another' says, since you're asking. I mean at least goldbugs have a literal shiny object that goes part-way to explaining their mania.

So this is just Panamanian stuff, yes? Like if, hypothetically, somebody once registered a Nevis LLC and held modest assets in a Belize bank, that information has not been leaked, correct? Asking for friend.

It's documents from a Panamanian law firm that operates in tax havens around the world. Unless you're friend used the law firm, there is no reason for them to be included.

Anybody in the list that Clinton pardoned?

Nah man, it's greed and being a ****ty person that leads to it.

Lol this guy. I'm sure he's against food stamps and universal healthcare, but boy he'll find all sorts of justification for greedy criminals who could easily afford to pay their full share and still be set for life if not several generations.

How did you conclude that Panama is used illegally more than any other haven? The disadvantage that the blog post pointed out was location to the UK which is not all that compelling.

I hope the GOP is rejecting piecemeal tax code reform like the Dems rejected piecemeal immigration reform.

Sorry, I should have known Clinton would never pardon a proven tax evader.

Should also lead to evidence of real corruption. I.e. politicians having amounts of money they can't explain.