“The letter from the Russian banker from Constantinople was the positive answer that Saccard expected to start a business in Paris. A day later, waking up, by sudden inspiration, he decided to act today and even before evening form a syndicate of loyal people in order to immediately place fifty thousand five hundred francs shares of his anonymous society with a capital of twenty-five million …"
Thus began the great scam of Aristide Saccard from Emile Zola's novel "Money" - the story of the construction and collapse of a colossal financial pyramid, the ruins of which crushed the lives of many people. The owners of the Panamanian law firm, Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca, probably felt something similar when they began to receive offers to arrange offshore deals from people who are usually called the ruling class, the world elite and the powerful.
When we are told that the Panamanian office is one of tens of thousands of similar establishments, they lie to us. Mossack Fonseca is one of the five largest companies in this market. It employs over 500 people. It has 40 branches worldwide, including two in Switzerland and nine in China. Among her clients are 29 people from the Forbes list of "500 richest people in the world." Let's not forget that the top 62 billionaires on this list have wealth equal to 3.5 billion people - half of the world's population. No, this is not an ordinary company. This is the flagship, which became such for its ability to keep secrets.
Today, when the Panama Papers can be read by anyone, there is no shortage of conspiracy theories.
How did you get the Süddeiche Zeitung file? Someone, says the newspaper, who identified himself as John Doe (a pseudonym used in American courts when the name of the victim or the accused cannot be named for security or confidentiality reasons), emailed several documents for trial. The editors replied that they want to get the rest. The anonymous author set two conditions: his life is in danger, so no personal meetings, communication only in cipher. When asked about the motives, the answer was: "I want to make these crimes public."
An intriguing start. Not the fact that everything was exactly like that, but it happens. The press is not required to name its informant and is not required to prove anything. In the United States, if a court requires a journalist to name a source (this is only possible in a criminal case), and the journalist refuses, he goes to jail for contempt of court. There are a lot of such cases. The Watergate promoters Bob Woodward and Karl Bernstein kept Deep Throat, their FBI informant, incognito for over 30 years. He did it himself at the age of 92, two and a half years before his death, although the statute of limitations for disclosing official secrets had expired a long time ago. Mark Felt was the deputy director of the FBI. If then, in 1974, the case had gone to trial, the journalists would have gone to jail, and it is quite possible that without Felt's testimony, Richard Nixon's guilt would not have been possible to prove. But Nixon chose not to tempt fate and left the post himself, having previously secured a pardon promise from his successor, Gerald Ford.
Times are different now. The Panama scandal did not shake the foundations. China simply blocks any mention of the involvement of the PRC leadership in offshore transactions on the Internet, and in the programs of the Japanese television channel NHK, it sprinkles words on this topic. The monarchies of the Persian Gulf and Russia did not care about these revelations.
Much more entertaining and intricate conspiracy theory. One of the most exciting is that Soros has declared war on Rothschild - "new money" against "old". After all, Soros's Open Society Foundation is listed among the sponsors of the journalistic consortium, and the name Rothschild appears in the investigation - for example, the Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region Boris Dubrovsky used an account in the Swiss Banque Privee Edmond de Rothschild for his offshore operations. What more proof do you need? The Rothschild family is listed as a friend of Russian oligarchs (or oligarchs as friends of a family), and Soros is a well-known Russophobe and financier of "color revolutions".
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The other version does not shine with originality either. The consortium seems to be acting on the orders of the US government - no wonder, they say, not a single American is listed among the clients of the Panamanian firm, but it is entirely American funds that finance the investigation: whoever pays calls the tune. The program VGTRK Vesti went farthest along this path, which recently showed a story about how the insidious American special services tried to buy up at the root and for a pittance the Russian company National Telecommunications, the largest operator of cable TV and the Internet - whose assets are specially for this the targets were taken offshore. But the FSB reported to the president on time, his friends chipped in and intercepted the deal - that's, they say, where the two billion that the hired scribblers only managed to find came from.
The plot ends wonderfully: “We were not told whose other offshore companies our special services can use in the interests of the country with the involvement of state-oriented business. May it be a surprise to the CIA next time too. But this time they worked badly and ran into the wrong people."
Firstly, as for the American offshore amateurs, they are still in the Panamanian dossier, although their names are not so impressive. Let's not forget that Mossack Fonseca managed to clean up its office in Las Vegas (the only one in the USA). Secondly, in this version, ends do not fit in: if Washington is so disgraced with "Putin's billions," why did he need an investigation? To communicate your shame to the world? Finally, the third theory, which we were pleased with by the most famous and authoritative expert on Russia, Clifford Gaddy, was that Russia arranged the leak, either by hacking the servers of the Panama office, or simply by gaining access to the materials of the FATF (Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering) through the Federal Service for financial monitoring. Let me remind youthat this department has been directly subordinate to the president since May 21, 2012 - almost no one paid attention to this decree. The last time the president and the head of the service, Yuri Chikhanchin, met on March 10 this year, just before the Panamanian sensation.
What are Gaddy's arguments for this version? First, an exceptionally modest "exposure" about Putin. But now Putin can say: “So what? Everybody does it. " The damage to Putin is minimal, no "Russian secrets" have been revealed. Significant for the US allies. And finally, Russian hackers are famous all over the world. So, in fact, this is not a message from the West to Putin, but from Putin to the West: if relations do not improve, we can get to more serious names and operations.
And only the version of the unselfish lover of truth is not considered by anyone.
