Panama just passed compliance with FATF (February 2016) and it's a message that their political leader/law firm owner/world's largest money launderer (his name is in the OP's title) is no longer open for business after decades of being the go-to place for hidden $$$.
"The FATF recognised that Algeria, Angola and Panama have made significant progress in improving their regimes to combat money laundering and terrorist financing and will therefore no longer be subject to the FATF’s monitoring process."
tl;dr - This is a multi-state G20 planned leak and not the work of some moral insider or hacker, the money laundering world is becoming a difficult place for outsiders. Real leaks don't have fancy websites with responsive vectorized portraits and a full on content /social media structure.
Indeed the website looks very good - and analyzing and presenting such a huge amount of data deserves respect.
But I was also wondering why this leak had to be embargoed for a year. Why not release the complete raw data very quickly (with irrelevant, privacy-sensitive areas visibly redacted) and follow up with a detailed analysis later?
I'm not critiquing the website, it looks great to be honest. It's comes across a little odd when you target just a small amount of people, it almost seems like a sales pitch.
The journalists need to be more transparent about the data and why these individuals were picked first, and how the data release is going to work.
I hope for your sake you don't have to vectorize everyone mentioned in the data.
Worth pointing out: this is, in no way, done by a single media organization. This is a collaborative effort of ~107 news organizations from all over the world, and you can be sure that behind each of them there's a small dedicated tech team that worked tirelessly on making this thing look pretty.
Because this is such a huge collaborative effort involving over 300 journalists from god knows how many countries, we barely managed to set an embargo until 8 PM (CEST). An hour before that, there were literally less than 10 tweets using #panamapapers. Now, there's over half a million. And it's been just seven hours since I have started the tweet wall in our office!
From this point on, I believe that every media organization is going to focus on its own region, although I cannot guarantee that. After all, my job was to make the website look pretty. I had the honor of reading some of the stories before anyone else while I was preparing them for the website (and I will have the same honor again in ~5-6 hours), but that's about it.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment, but if you have such an event ongoing and you manage to keep silence about it for over a year between ~300 people from half a dozen countries and 107 organisations - to such an extent that two hours before you have not more than ten tweets - then it looks to me that coordination works extremely well.
Honestly that is becoming more clear and I might have jumped the gun in my initial comment.
It went viral very fast, I think it would have been a great idea to say that each "regional' media representative would be disclosing more info within the next couple of weeks.. on the website!
And if some important info was not disclosed regionally there would also be a follow up, because right now you have to admit.. not many Western names are showing up if any ( don't mention Cameron and the others since this was already exposed pre-leak).
> Real leaks don't have fancy websites with responsive vectorized portraits and a full on content /social media structure.
I don't understand this. Don't newspapers always make stories that they can tell are important more engaging for the reader? Here's a cute Guardian flash interactive from Cablegate, [1] and another nice Washington Post interactive on the same story. [2] Here's a really fancy six-part interactive from the Guardian in the wake of the Snowden files. [3] Whenever the media publishes leaks they will make similar things, even when Western governments act strenuously to prevent publication, as in the case of Cablegate and Snowden.
How does a well-presented story indicate anything other than the media thought this was a story which was important and in the public interest?
They state at the very outset that they worked on the data for over a year, doing OCR, analyzing, digesting, cross-referencing, etc. No one is presenting a false front -- they aren't claiming that this is a bunch of files that they got yesterday, and instead are quite up front that they've done a lot of leg work on top of it.
So yes, the presentation was clearly "planned". That doesn't make the data any less real.
But you haven't produced any real evidence for this claim.
The ICIJ has co-ordinated the reporting on the leak, sure; but that's not the same as claiming the leak itself was in bad faith, part of some wider state-sponsored conspiracy from G20 nations, etc.
It would lose credibility if it was just a dump. Some would claim its false, others would alter it, to the point that enough confusion would be created to make it totally untrustworthy. Unfortunately thats how manipulation works.
Did you have this same position with the Snowden leaks? Dump it on the web and it lacks credibility. Filter it through journalists who can use their resellers to make sense of it and the public gets to hear the important repercussions of the leak instead of having to try and figure it all out themselves.
At least they were transparent to exactly why the information was filtered. Credibility is certainly a good point but 100 people are going to have issue with sifting through terabytes of data.
> This is a multi-state G20 planned leak and not the work of some moral insider or hacker, the money laundering world is becoming a difficult place and for good reason.
I agree
And of course those in the know are moving to hide their assets somewhere else
The heads up was given a long time ago, you won't find their names in the leak, it's kinda funny Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson is being outed, I guess he didn't get the memo on account of his recent actions.
Not in the UK. Leaks and "off the record briefings" are practically official government policy.
To me this looks like a rather stupid attempt to promote regime change in Russia. Putin was weakened by the low oil price, and now this has all the signs of a bizarre poli-sci undergraduate plot to push him over the edge.
I'll change my mind if a list of significant British and US pols with Panamanian accounts appears - because any suggestion that there aren't any is frankly risible.
> Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to UK political parties have had offshore assets.
I expect we'll hear more about this in coming days and weeks.
I don't really understand this line of thinking. Big leak + "fancy website graphics" = vast Western conspiracy? Sounds less like insightful analysis and more like the kind of denial I'd expect from RT.
The reason I'm thinking "vast Western conspiracy" is that you would think, as a common sense point, that when something like this appears Western journalists would be more interested in Western politicians first.
But apparently not. I find that strange.
I also find it strange that more people don't find it strange - because it's always been obvious to me that Putin is a completely generic oligarch crook, and I really don't understand why anyone would be surprised that he acts like one.
But here's an interesting fact - public opinion management has a long history in the West, just as it does in all other big states. It's been tracked by journalists and academics, discussed in Senate committees, and explored in books. It's a long way from being either hostile state propaganda or weirdo conspiracy nonsense.
I'm quite prepared to believe that a lot of HN readers haven't taken the time to familiarise themselves with that history, but that doesn't change the historical record.
And if absolutely no US pols are implicated in this leak, I'll continue to find that curious and strange, no matter how many downvotes I get here.
As for UK pols - we'll see exactly what that means in practice. Most people here know that Cameron's father made his money as a tax consultant to the privileged, and that our beloved Chancellor's family business never pays tax.
It would certainly be interesting, timely, and welcome if other members of the government were outed as avoiding significant sums. But until more facts appear, it's too early to tell how this will play out.
> And if absolutely no US pols are implicated in this leak, I'll continue to find that curious and strange, no matter how many downvotes I get here.
Agreed. But I do fully expect to see those revealed as soon as the journalists have made sure that their case against them is watertight. Meanwhile, I'll be taking a look at the Mexican ones myself. Since there is still a difference between knowing that most of our politicians and corporate owners are corrupt in the abstract and knowing the details. In fact, I'll check that even if this turns out to be an actual geopolitical conspiracy, so long as the data is truthful (even if partial).
I would surmise that they are holding off on Western Pols because they want to keep eyes as long as possible on this. For these organizations, eyeballs are money.
If they released a huge set of people on day one and didn't have much to show on day two, this would fall off the news cycle really quickly. I think that with the US political climate, they'll focus there soon, but they want a lot of people paying attention first.
This is just a guess, but it seems logical. We've seen this kind of slow-drip journalism with big data dumps in the past.
That makes the government sound like single atomic entity - it is, of course, made up of politicians who spend a significant proportion of their time playing the game of politics.
Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, has described how Number 10 typically can't see the diaries of cabinet ministers as this would allow them to work out which minister was lunching with which journalist and therefore where particular leaks came from. Of course, Number 10 also briefs for and against individual ministers.
http://www.fatf-gafi.org/countries/#Panama
"The FATF recognised that Algeria, Angola and Panama have made significant progress in improving their regimes to combat money laundering and terrorist financing and will therefore no longer be subject to the FATF’s monitoring process."
Also let's not forgot about the CIA's asset Noriega and decades of money laundering which started all this, including recently trying to wipe cloud data off a Nevada company logs. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/articl...
tl;dr - This is a multi-state G20 planned leak and not the work of some moral insider or hacker, the money laundering world is becoming a difficult place for outsiders. Real leaks don't have fancy websites with responsive vectorized portraits and a full on content /social media structure.