Pandora Papers: Billionaire Fraud Exposed (Script & Sources)

Good morning, good news: an unprecedentedly data leak just exposed hundreds of billionaires, celebrities, judges, religious leaders, members of royal families, and even heads of state like Vladimir Putin of Russia and King Abdullah of Jordan, for having hidden offshores assets and businesses by using tax havens like Panama, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland, and the Cayman Islands.

This is the biggest financial leak in history, it involves 11.9 million documents, 2.9 terabytes of data, and details the underground shadow network utilized by the richest people in the world to not only avoid any paying taxes on their extreme wealth, which is collectively trillions of dollars, but also how they use shell companies to hoard millions of dollars property, mega yachts, Picasso paintings, Banksy murals, even illegal stolen historical artifacts.

This incredible bombshell of a report is being called the Pandora Papers, and comes from the ICIJ, the international consortium of investigative journalists, who were also responsible for the 2016 Panama Papers which detailed similar financial leaks from just one offshore tax haven provider - this leak includes 14 of them, covers 27,000 companies, and has taken over 600 journalist in 117 countries to sort through all the data.

It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal this is, and how powerful the people it exposes are. We’ve known for decades that the ultra-wealthy not only don’t play by the same financial rules as everyone else, they don’t even play in the same economy. Their wealth isn’t public, and neither are its sources or how it’s used in the ongoing poisoning of our discourse, our politics, our economies, and especially our environment - and this unprecedented data leak and investigation shines a light on how that global oligarchy functions. Over the coming weeks, specific details will come out from ICIJ media partners like the Washington Post and The Guardian outlining the major players and their secret assets.

Tax havens are a disaster. It should obviously be illegal for heads of state to funnel money through fake companies whose owners are kept secret by corrupt governments with no disclosure requirements in order to avoid legal and financial scrutiny. According to the ICIJ, as much as 32 trillion dollars are hidden in offshore accounts, and the ultra-wealthy avoid paying up to $600 billion dollars a year in taxes. That’s money that should be going to help the world’s working class through social welfare, and is instead spent on things like hoarding property so that nobody but billionaires can afford to buy it.

It’s easy to forget that the United States isn’t the only country with uncontrollable wealth inequality, this is a global corruption problem that fuels rampant human and environmental exploitation, and even though it’s been going on in secret, its effects are obvious.