"John Doe," the mysterious
whistleblower who released
the largest-ever leak of
confidential documents in world
history -- papers from the
Panamanian law firm Mossack-Fonseca,
a key player in the offshore dark
money industry -- has published
their first-ever public statement.
The first thing you'll notice in
reading the 1,400 word manifesto is
that Doe is eloquent. Like
Snowden and a few others from the
society of modern whistleblowing,
Doe writes beautifully,
passionately, and intelligently
about their motives. They have
clearly spent a lot of time thinking
about the information they had
access to, and what it meant for the
world, and what it would mean for
them to come forward with it,
risking everything.
Doe offers a general critique of
secretive finance capitalism, and
cites specifics from the Panama
Papers showing that Mossack-Fonseca
wasn't just involved in helping the
wealthy avoid taxes and starve
countries of the treasure they
needed to provide the most basic
services -- they also
knowingly laundered money used
by rich paedophiles to traffick in
13 year old sex slaves.
Doe isn't content to discuss their
general grievances with corruption:
in laser-focused specific detail,
they cite policies and actions from
specific governments and politicians
(the UK Conservative party, David
Cameron, NZ Prime Minister John Key,
a few others) and how their
hypocrisy motivated them to act.
He also discusses the role of
whistleblowing in modern society.
Running through the punishments
visited upon leakers like Snowden
(but also Luxleaks' Antoine Deltour
and UBS leaker Bradley Birkenfeld),
Doe says that they chose not to go
public specifically because they
believed that the same leaders who'd
made the moral compromises that
enabled the corruption of offshore
finance were also committed to
destroying the lives of those who
came forward with information about
the most urgent, terrible crimes.
Doe cheers on the International
Consortium of Investigative
Journalists for refusing to share
the raw Panama Papers with law
enforcement, as is fitting for
independent journalists, and goes on
to offer to turn over those
documents to law enforcement
independently, but with the caveats
about the risks to their own
freedom.
Doe also disavows being a spy of any
kind, saying that they never worked
or contracted for any spy agency or
government.
And while it’s one thing to
extol the virtues of government
transparency at summits and in
sound bites, it’s quite another
to actually implement it. It is
an open secret that in the
United States, elected
representatives spend the
majority of their time
fundraising. Tax evasion cannot
possibly be fixed while elected
officials are pleading for money
from the very elites who have
the strongest incentives to
avoid taxes relative to any
other segment of the population.
These unsavoury political
practices have come full circle
and they are irreconcilable.
Reform of America’s broken
campaign finance system cannot
wait.
Of course, those are hardly the
only issues that need fixing.
Prime Minister John Key of New
Zealand has been curiously quiet
about his country’s role in
enabling the financial fraud
Mecca that is the Cook Islands.
In Britain, the Tories have been
shameless about concealing their
own practices involving offshore
companies, while Jennifer Shasky
Calvery, the director of the
Financial Crimes Enforcement
Network at the United States
Treasury, just announced her
resignation to work instead for
HSBC, one of the most notorious
banks on the planet (not
coincidentally headquartered in
London). And so the familiar
swish of America’s revolving
door echoes amidst deafening
global silence from thousands of
yet-to-be-discovered ultimate
beneficial owners who are likely
praying that her replacement is
equally spineless. In the face
of political cowardice, it’s
tempting to yield to defeatism,
to argue that the status quo
remains fundamentally unchanged,
while the Panama Papers are, if
nothing else, a glaring symptom
of our society’s progressively
diseased and decaying moral
fabric.
But the issue is finally on the
table, and that change takes
time is no surprise. For fifty
years, executive, legislative,
and judicial branches around the
globe have utterly failed to
address the metastasizing tax
havens spotting Earth’s surface.
Even today, Panama says it wants
to be known for more than
papers, but its government has
conveniently examined only one
of the horses on its offshore
merry-go-round.
Panama Papers Source Offers
Documents To Governments, Hints At
More To Come [John Doe/ICIJ]
Search The Offshore Leaks
Database
Find out who’s behind almost 320,000
offshore companies and trusts from
the Panama Papers and the Offshore
Leaks investigations.
https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/
