Panama Papers - What About The American Money ?

The Panama Papers Scandal generated low trickle-down effects on the American continent, the only plausible explanation being that the American rather concentrate on different destinations for tax evasion.

So far, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has only been able to identify 211 people with U.S. addresses who own companies in the data (not all of whom we’ve been able to investigate yet). We don’t know if those 211 people are necessarily U.S. citizens. And that figure covers only data from recent years available on a Mossack Fonseca internal database — not all 11.5 million files from the leak.

In other words, that 211 number comes from just a small sliver of the data. “It’s a complete underestimate,” says Mar Cabra, head of the data and research unit at the ICIJ. Finding a precise number of Americans in the data is difficult.

Not surprisingly, though, a lot of people are asking: If this is the biggest data leak in history – and our biggest window ever onto the offshore world – where are all the Americans? After all, an estimated $150 billion in potential U.S. tax revenues disappears into offshore tax schemes each year, according to a 2014 Senate subcommittee report. We asked top experts in offshore finance to break down the American-related aspects of the Panama Papers leak.

None of the half dozen tax experts I spoke with were surprised with the lack of American names in the Panama Papers. And they also emphasized that storing money in an offshore account does not necessarily mean that the account holder is breaking the law. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which was one of the leading news organizations behind the leak, has been careful not to accuse any of those with accounts at Mossack Fonseca of wrongdoing, and it has not released—and does not intend to release—the actual data.
But the paper does intend to release more stories in the days ahead, and those stories may include more Americans. When asked about the lack of Americans in the original release, the German newspaper’s editor responded mysteriously: “Just wait for what is coming next.”