Subtitled: Panama Red?
(the accompanying text and Tweets)
The first story I’d seen about the papers was Luke Harding (scribe to the west) at the Guardian, Tweeted by WikiLeaks: ‘Revealed: the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin’. (long x 2, and with a Putin money trail graphic and everything!) The long tale of the Putin/cellist bromance is…so romantic, as is the photo.
Given that this is an open thread, and you can go digging, and that I have lots of RL obligations to attend to, allow me to copypaste some of B at Moon of Alabama’s ‘Selective Leaks Of The #PanamaPapers Create Huge Blackmail Potential’. It’s all worth reading, but highlights include:
“A real leak of data from a law firm in Panama would be very interesting. Many rich people and/or politicians hide money in shell companies that such firms in Panama provide. But the current heavily promoted “leak” of such data to several NATO supporting news organization and a US government financed “Non Government Organization” is just a lame attempt to smear some people the U.S. empire dislikes. It also creates a huge blackmail opportunity by NOT publishing certain data in return for this or that desired favor.”
Now being a detractor of Pierre’s and of the Intercept in general, I sincerely loved this part:
“Already some 16 month ago Ken Silverstein reported for Vice on a big shady shell company provider, Mossak Fonseca in Panama. (Pierre Omidyar’s Intercept, for which Silverstein was then working, refused to publish the piece.)
Yves Smith published several big stories about the Mossak Fonseca money laundering business. Silverstein also repeated the well known fact that Rami Makhlouf, a rich cousin of the Syrian president Assad, had some money hidden in Mossak Fonseca shell companies.”
“Essentially the Sueddeutsche compiled a list of known criminals and people and organizations the U.S. dislikes and cross checked them with the “leaked” database. Selected hits were then further evaluated. The outcome are stories like the annual attempt to smear the Russian president Putin, who is not even mentioned in the Mossak Fonseca data, accusations against various people of the soccer association FIFA, much disliked by the U.S., and a few mentions of other miscreants of minor relevancy.
There is no story about any U.S. person, none at all, nor about any important NATO politician. The highest political “casualty” so far is the irrelevant Prime Minister of Iceland Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson who, together with his wife, owned one of the shell companies. There is no evidence that the ownership or the money held by that company were illegal.
So where is the beef? [snip]
“The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is part of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) which is financed by the U.S. government through USAID”
He then quotes the former UK Ambasador Craig Murray’s ‘Corporate Media Gatekeepers Protect Western 1% From Panama Leak’, but not the part where Murray says he believes that Putin’s bent, but why Russsia, given that Russian wealth is only a tiny minority of the money hidden away with the aid of Mossack Fonseca. He writes that the leaker’s mistake was turning to Western corporate media to publish them. I’d ask if it weren’t the plan to begin with, but never mind.
“In fact, it soon becomes obvious that the selective reporting is going to stink. [snip]
“The filtering of this Mossack Fonseca information by the corporate media follows a direct western governmental agenda. There is no mention at all of use of Mossack Fonseca by massive western corporations or western billionaires – the main customers. And the Guardian is quick to reassure that “much of the leaked material will remain private.”
What do you expect? The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”, which is funded and organised entirely by the USA’s Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include
Ford Foundation
Carnegie Endowment
Rockefeller Family Fund
W K Kellogg Foundation
Open Society Foundation (Soros)
among many others. Do not expect a genuine expose of western capitalism. The dirty secrets of western corporations will remain unpublished.
Expect hits at Russia, Iran and Syria and some tiny “balancing” western country like Iceland. A superannuated UK peer or two will be sacrificed – someone already with dementia.
The corporate media – the Guardian and BBC in the UK – have exclusive access to the database which you and I cannot see. They are protecting themselves from even seeing western corporations’ sensitive information by only looking at those documents which are brought up by specific searches such as UN sanctions busters. Never forget the Guardian smashed its copies of the Snowden files on the instruction of MI6.
What if they did Mossack Fonseca database searches on the owners of all the corporate media and their companies, and all the editors and senior corporate media journalists? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on all the most senior people at the BBC? What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on every donor to the Center for Public Integrity and their companies?
What if they did Mossack Fonseca searches on every listed company in the western stock exchanges, and on every western millionaire they could trace?
That would be much more interesting. I know Russia and China are corrupt, you don’t have to tell me that. What if you look at things that we might, here in the west, be able to rise up and do something about?”
There is, of course a #PanamaPapers hashtag on Twitter already. I’d tried to grab a WikiLeaks Tweet a bit ago, and it crashed my laptop…so I won’t try again. Have some fun with it all, including things like this:
And who benefits from all this? Some say it’s a limited hangout, but I’ve never fully understood the term. A major distraction from more (ahem) important news? And why now, especially as the Sueddeutsche Zeitung has had the data papers for over a year now?
p.s. Victoria Nuland might have some explaining to do about Poroshenko’s dealings…
p.s.s. WikiLeaks published the records of a 19 March 2016 teleconference between the top two IMF officials in charge of managing the Greek debt crisis, and hoo-boy, the accusations and denials are flyin’ fast. But that’s for another day when WikiLeaks isn’t quite as compromised.
