Daniel Hall, a director of Burford’s asset recovery business, contributed an article to Global Legal Post in which he answers the question: In the year since the Panama Papers were first released, has the net been tightened around the offshore world?
When the world woke up to news of history’s biggest ever data leak a year ago, it lifted the lid on the murky world of offshore tax regimes–usually sun-kissed islands where the rich, famous and infamous alike, can hide wealth from view.
The Panama Papers involved 11.5m files from the database of the world’s fourth-biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca, and was obtained by international press from an anonymous source.
While the wider public was shocked by the practices exposed, it is probably a safe assumption to say most professionals were not. Although they may have alarmed by its scale, the methods used were basic and themselves not new; Mossack Fonseca was not re-inventing the wheel.