The Panama Papers Show Us That Every Political System in the World Might Be Rigged

And they're the result of a brilliant international exercise in investigative journalism.

MADISON, WISCONSIN—You'll have to forgive me, but it was the weekend, so I didn't manage to get through all 11.5 million files that were leaked regarding who was stashing how much money where around the globe. But I read enough to know that a whole massive amount of the world's financial and political corruption got dumped onto the Intertoobz, certainly enough to give more weight to the possibility that every political system in the world—even the nakedly authoritarian ones—is hopelessly rigged, and that the marvelous new world of the miraculous global economy is an even bigger thieves' paradise than you, me, or even Jamie Dimon thought it was.


Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens. A $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president's best friend—a cellist called Sergei Roldugin—is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin's daughter Katerina got married.

Among national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt's former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson. Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to UK political parties have had offshore assets. The families of at least eight current and former members of China's supreme ruling body, the politburo, have been found to have hidden wealth offshore. Twenty-three individuals who have had sanctions imposed on them for supporting the regimes in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran and Syria have been clients of Mossack Fonseca. Their companies were harboured by the Seychelles, the British Virgin Islands, Panama and other jurisdictions. A key member of Fifa's powerful ethics committee, which is supposed to be spearheading reform at world football's scandal-hit governing body, acted as a lawyer for individuals and companies recently charged with bribery and corruption. One leaked memorandum from a partner of Mossack Fonseca said: "Ninety-five per cent of our work coincidentally consists in selling vehicles to avoid taxes."

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