Tackling the real scandal behind the Panama Papers

  The Panama Papers leak exposed to the world the offshore holdings of world leaders and their families. Iceland’s prime minister, Ukraine’s president, and the king of Saudi Arabia, as well as close associates of Hosni Mubarak, Bashar al-Assad, and Vladimir Putin, were among those exposed when names linked to the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca were leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

  But, while big names captured the headlines, it wasn’t just the impunity of a powerful few that caused the scandal. The more disturbing revelation is the tangled web of financial flows—both licit and illicit—that made such impunity possible in the first place. Despite the rise of a global anti-corruption movement and technologically driven advances in transparency that have made privacy all but impossible in other spheres, hiding money for illicit purposes is nearly as easy today as it was 25 years ago. The real scandal of the Panama Papers is not that corruption continues to exist; it is that many of the methods that kleptocrats and criminals use to hide dirty money remain perfectly legal.