Other People's Secrets: How Important Are The Panama Papers To New Zealand?

Sunny Hideaways For Shady People: Tax Havens are a very big news right now, but how big a deal are they for New Zealand? Much has been made of the 60,000 references to this country in the Panama Papers. That sounds like a lot. But in a dump of 11.5 million documents, 60,000 references is actually a very small number indeed. Assuming there is only one reference to New Zealand per document (which hardly seems likely) our country’s name is to be found in just 0.005 percent of the documents leaked.

 

THE PANAMA PAPERS are a big deal. No sensible person would attempt to argue otherwise. Thanks to the leaking of upwards of 11.5 million electronic documents the world is now in possession of incontrovertible proof of the global elite’s perfidious allergy to paying tax. What had been the stuff of thrillers by John Le Carré and John Grisham, has become the substance of nightly news bulletins.

 

But how big a deal are the Panama Papers in New Zealand? Much has been made of the 60,000 references to this country in the leaked documents. That sounds like a lot. But in a dump of 11.5 million documents, 60,000 references is actually a very small number indeed. Assuming there is only one reference to New Zealand per document (which hardly seems likely) our country’s name is to be found in just 0.5 percent of the documents leaked.

 

I would hazard a fair amount on there being a considerably larger number of references to the Cayman Islands, the Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Cook Islands in the Panama Papers than there are to the islands of New Zealand.

 

It is also important to note that the warnings that have been issued to the New Zealand Government by an assortment of both public and private bodies have tended heavily towards the contingent. If the powers-that-be do not act quickly, there is a risk that New Zealand’s reputation as one of the world’s least corrupt and most transparent countries might be damaged. Which suggests we’ve still got quite a way to go before we get to count ourselves among the Caymans, the Virgins and the Turks and Caicosses.

 

Which is not to say that the 12,000 overseas trusts currently availing themselves of this country’s less-than-robust disclosure regime are all squeaky clean. On the contrary, there’s a better than even chance that a newsworthy number of shady characters have been using these instruments to hide a whole lot of even shadier goings-on.

 

As the International Consortium of Investigate Journalists and their colleagues in the global news media pore over the Panama Papers, we are bound to discover a disappointing number of New Zealand individuals, businesses and organisations in the frame.

 

Will our own Prime Minister be among them? Is John Key about to suffer the same fate as the erstwhile Prime Minister of Iceland, Sigmunder Gunnlaugsson, or the present, increasingly beleaguered, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron?

 

Well, John Key is a very wealthy man, and if the Panama Papers have shown us anything it is the extraordinary lengths to which very rich people will go to protect their financial affairs from the scrutiny and criticism of those who are not very rich. For years, rumours have circulated that Key is worth considerably more than the $NZ55 million he publicly acknowledges. If the rumours are true, then the rest of his fortune may well have been salted away where the sun shines and the trade-winds blow. But by whom? Mossack Fonseca isn’t the only law firm that specialises in keeping prying eyes away from very rich people’s financial information. And you can bet that the others are working day-and-night to beef-up their security.

 

Personally-speaking, I’d be surprised if our Prime Minister goes the way of Gunnlaugsson or Cameron. Key has spent his whole life working towards the position he now holds, and all along the way he has been extraordinarily careful to avoid doing anything that might come back to bite him when he was Prime Minister. While the other London currency traders were winging their way across the Atlantic for a weekend of drug-fuelled debauchery in Las Vegas, John Key was heading home for a quiet weekend with Bronagh and the kids. Would he put everything he’s worked for so carefully at risk by squirrelling away millions in some Caribbean tax haven? I can’t see it, myself.

 

Then again, who among the very rich could have foreseen the acute danger into which this age of digitalised information storage, retrieval and communication was leading them? John Key? Many New Zealanders have wondered at their Prime Minister’s interest (some would say obsession) with cyber-security, and noted his extreme hostility towards individuals and groups accused of abusing and/or violating the supposedly secure zones of cyber-space. Exactly what was driving Key’s inflated disquiet about the security of secret information has never been very clear.

 

As the tens-of-thousands of secrets contained in the Panama Papers are revealed to the world, however, there will be more than a few Kiwis who will insist on ending the above paragraph with the words – until now.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 12 April 2016.

"Different From You And Me": Some Thoughts On The Panama Papers.

Sinking In A Sea Of Scandal: If the world has been left open-mouthed by the Panama Papers, it is largely on account of the sudden transition of fiction to fact. No matter how painstakingly John Le Carré or John Grisham construct their plots; no matter how realistically they draw their characters; their readers have, until now, been able to console themselves with the thought that, in the end, it’s only a story. Well, not anymore!

 

THEY’RE CALLING THEM “The Panama Papers”. A vast haul of electronic documents, said to be several orders of magnitude bigger than the infamous Wikileaks “dump” of 2010, which is leaving the world open-mouthed. Stolen from the secretive Panamanian-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca, the Panama Papers have exposed the dodgy financial dealings of the global elites for all to see. Or, at least, read about.

 

But how shocked are we, really? For decades now, novelists and screenwriters have been entertaining us with dark tales of criminal law firms and offshore tax havens. We’ve been told, in detail, how arms dealers and drug traffickers launder their ill-gotten gains through the international financial system. We know all about front organisations, dummy companies and blind trusts. In the world of fiction, none of this is new.

 

This coming Sunday, for example, tens-of-thousands of New Zealanders will watch the final episode of the BBC’s superb thriller, The Night Manager, hoping against hope that the devilish arms dealer, Richard Roper (played to perfection by Hugh Laurie) will get what’s coming to him.

 

But, we will not be surprised (because John Le Carré has taught us not to be) if the villain somehow manages to slip through the hero’s fingers. Happy endings aren’t what they used to be. If the global financial crisis proved that some banks are “too big to fail”, is it really that big a stretch to believe that some people are too big to catch? And, if we’re honest, don’t we find the unrepentant arrogance of the 1 Percenters just a teeny bit thrilling?

 

If the world has been left open-mouthed by the Panama Papers, isn’t it more likely on account of the sudden transition of fiction to fact? No matter how painstakingly Le Carré or John Grisham construct their plots; no matter how realistically they draw their characters; their readers have, until now, been able to console themselves with the thought that, in the end, it’s only a story. They think about the hum-drum nature of their own lives, and, reluctantly file the whole the notion of swashbuckling villainy, enacted on a global scale, under “I” – for implausible.

 

Well, not anymore!

 

It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

 

It’s not something those of us who are not very rich care to admit, but the Panama Papers prove beyond all reasonable doubt that Fitzgerald was right. The very rich are very different from us.

 

It’s not that they’re immoral, more that they are absolutely certain that the morality that constrains the rest of humanity simply doesn’t apply to them. As Fitzgerald put it: “They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.”

 

That’s why they need law firms like Mossack Fonseca: to hide their dealings from the eyes of all those silly people who subscribe to the utterly ridiculous notion that we are all equal. People like that, ordinary people, just don’t understand – will never understand – the needs of the very rich.

 

Not that the very rich think about ordinary people very often – why would they? What does get their attention, however, is the frightening news that ordinary people are thinking about them. Nothing turns a genial Bertie Wooster into a ferocious Richard Roper faster than the unwarranted scrutiny of the lower orders. Popular envy the very rich can tolerate, even enjoy: but popular interference; that is another matter altogether.

 

John Key’s reaction to the global release of the Panama Papers has been interesting. Where the Opposition parties have greeted the news that their country’s less-than-robust tax laws are being exploited by the likes of Mossack Fonseca with demands for official inquiries and swift legislative action, New Zealand’s Prime Minister has evinced a lofty nonchalance.

 

There were many, perfectly legitimate, reasons that a foreign investor might set up in New Zealand, Mr Key told journalists. It was quite wrong, he insisted, to call his country a “tax haven”.

 

A very different response from the one people like you and me might expect. But, then, Mr Key is very rich.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 April 2016.

Shrugging-Off The Panama Papers.

"... What? ...": John Key, when asked which secret trusts were being used for tax dodging, hiding stolen assets and/or laundering money, responded with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders.

 

THE PANAMA PAPERS have elicited a remarkably low key response from the Prime Minister. The Labour Leader, Andrew Little, has described how John Key, when asked which secret trusts were being used for tax dodging, hiding stolen assets and/or laundering money, responded with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. The day before, when challenged about the potential damage to New Zealand’s reputation – now that we’ve been fingered as a simply dandy spot for masking the millions of Mossack Fonseca’s clients – John Key told journalists that there were many, perfectly legitimate, reasons why a foreign investor might park his money in New Zealand, adding that it was quite wrong to call his country a “tax haven”.

 

Key’s “ … what? …” reaction to the colossal data leak which has already claimed the scalp of one prime minister and put the careers of many other world leaders at risk is rather perplexing. Is he not able to predict the impact the Panama Papers are bound to have on the privileged privacy of the global elites? How the 11 million-plus documents are going to be used to prise open the lid of one of the biggest cans of plutocratic worms the world has ever seen. Why doesn’t he get it?

 

There are 55 million answers to that question. For a long time now John Key’s fortune has dulled his otherwise acute political judgement. Six years ago, in May 2010, Key’s government came under heavy criticism for tax cuts conferring huge windfalls of cash upon the wealthiest New Zealanders. Not yet two years into the job, he struggled to grasp the motivation for his critics’ outrage.

 

“We can be envious about these things”, purred the Prime Minister, “but without those people in our economy all the rest of us will either have less people paying tax or fundamentally less services that they provide.”

 

Seldom has so much of the mythology of the very rich been packed into a single sentence.

 

First comes the notion that his fellow citizens’ reaction to his government’s massive transfer of wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest members of their society is motivated not by their keen sense of its manifest injustice, but by simple, old-fashioned envy.

 

Then comes the argument that without such regular transfusions of cold hard cash, the very rich will simply up-stakes and leave for a more congenial jurisdiction. Somewhere that makes them feel welcome – not like lepers.

 

Finally, Key goes for the clincher. The notion that it is the energy and drive, the wisdom and skill, and the hard-earned cash of wealthy entrepreneurs that provides the rest of us “parasites” with the goods and services that we are simply too stupid and/or lazy to provide for ourselves.

 

Ayn Rand couldn’t have put it better.

 

In the light of this earlier demonstration of Key’s deep belief in the superiority of the very rich; and in the very different measures that must be taken of their needs and deeds; should we really be surprised when he struggles to understand exactly what the persons exposed by the Panama Papers have done wrong?

 

If you believed as strongly as John Key does that the very rich are better than you and me; and subject to a very different set of rules; then you would probably shrug-off the Panama Papers too.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 7 April 2016.